/parody-short

name: parody-short
description: Comedy shorts about a group's own life - a team's launch, quarter end, office move or leaving do; a club's season; a class's year; a family's Christmas - or about a shared topic everyone recognises (video calls, the return to the office), told in a borrowed genre (80s action intro, creature feature, Dickens Christmas ad, heist, nature documentary) and starring the group's real, animated photos or an invented cast. Covers mining the group's own context for in-jokes (chat, email, calendars, shared docs, plus domain tools like a CRM, helpdesk or git), mapping a genre's beats onto the real event, costuming and animating photos (image_edit then LTX), and per-genre look and sound. Use when someone asks for a fun, parody, spoof, holiday or "for the giggles" video about their team, colleagues, club, class or family, a party or all-hands video, or wants people's photos animated into a story.

Parody shorts

A short comedy for an audience that knows the people in it, or the situation: a team's big night told as an 80s action-show intro, a Halloween creature feature, a Christmas TV ad. The group can be any group (a sales team, a school staff room, a five-a-side club, a family) and the subject anything they lived through together. They land harder than anything else the toolkit makes, because the audience is laughing at things they recognise. This skill is how to make one on purpose.

Built and learned on three videos for one team in November 2026 (an action-show intro of a release, its Halloween sister cut, a Christmas ad of *A Christmas Carol*). They are not in `examples/` because they star real colleagues. Then on two public shorts with an invented cast (a horror trailer about the video call that never ends, a wildlife documentary about the return to the office), each in 16:9 and vertical, plus a brand edition in a product's own UI.

Why they work (in order of weight)

1. **Real faces, moving.** The step change was animating the team's profile photos. Stills got smiles; the same people raising aviators or toasting with punch got laughs. Recognition is the engine. See `people.md`. 2. **Real in-jokes.** Lines found in the team's own channels beat any written gag: a colleague's catchphrase, the feature someone keeps cramming in, the thing someone has been saying all along. The context pass is worth more than script polish. See `context.md`. 3. **A genre whose beats fit the event.** The audience already knows the shape (three rules that get broken; ghosts of past, present and future; the team assembling), so the video only fills the beats. The tighter the mapping, the less the script has to explain. See `genres.md`. 4. **Permission to exaggerate.** These are not release notes. Once the person asking says facts don't matter, numbers can be inflated and timelines invented. Ask once, early; then stop fact-checking jokes. 5. **Affection is the line.** Everyone is the hero of a gag or in on it, never its victim. That keeps it warm, and it is also the safety rule (below). 6. **A look and sound per genre.** Its own fonts, overlay and grade (VHS tracking, film grain and letterbox, candlelight), an original song or score, a few sound effects, at most one narrator line in an ad. Nothing should look like a toolkit template. 7. **Short.** An ad is 60-90 s. A "show intro" can run 2 min. Past ~2:30 the middle sags; cut there first. 8. **Pick every clip.** About one LTX clip in three cuts to a stranger. One wrong face breaks the spell, so contact-sheet every clip and re-roll.

Two kinds of cast

• **Real people** (the group's own photos): the strongest laughs, for an audience that knows them. Internal by

default; public only with each person's written OK.

• **An invented cast** (FLUX portraits, or non-human characters): for a public video, or a shared topic where the

audience recognises the situation rather than the people (video calls, the office kitchen). Recognition moves from the faces to the situation, so the situation has to be universal and specific: "you're on mute", the spreadsheet with 412 tabs, the jacket on the hot desk. See `people.md` step 0.

• **Cast once, use everywhere.** Generate the invented cast once in a shared folder and give each video its own

costumes and clips from the same faces. Two videos with the same four people feel like a series, and a callback between them (video 2's last line is video 1's first) is a free laugh.

Rules that are not optional

• **All affectionate.** Nobody in the group is the butt of a joke they'd mind. No performance, health,

personal life or anything said in confidence. When in doubt, cut the line.

• **Real people stay internal.** Their likeness belongs to them. Make it for the group, share it link-only, and ask

before posting anywhere public. Anyone in it who asks to be left out is left out.

• **Nothing sensitive on screen.** No customer or partner names, no hostnames, no secret values (a secret is a

blurred bar or `••••`), no internal URLs. Rename real systems ("RELAY ONE").

• **Original words and music.** Borrow a genre's *form*, never a work's characters, names, lines, designs or theme

tune. A public-domain story (Dickens, Grimm, Shakespeare) can be used directly; a film or TV show cannot, renamed or not. Write original lyrics for any song (`acestep` skill).

• **Quote only where the audience could have read it.** Public team channels, yes. DMs, no. See `context.md`.

Before you start

• **GPU endpoints** (Modal, once): `uv sync --extra modal && uv run modal setup`, then

`uv run tools/modal_setup.py flux2 image_edit ltx2 qwen3_tts`. LTX is gated: it needs a Modal secret with your Hugging Face token (`docs/modal-setup.md`). Music: a free `ACEMUSIC_API_KEY` in `.env` (`acestep` skill).

• **The project** is a plain Remotion project in `projects/<name>/`; no template fits, since nothing here should

look like one. Copy `package.json` and `remotion.config.t