mitate — 見立て, to see one thing as another. It sees any input — a document, a codebase, an idea — as a scene, and hands an agent the primitives to build it: an explainer, a cutscene, a comedy short. Deterministic, so the same t always renders the same frame.
No simulation state, no wall clock, no random() at runtime. seekTo(8) after seekTo(2) equals seekTo(8) cold. One scene file is both the live HTML and the source of a frame-exact render.
An agent is handed the building blocks — geometry, materials, a cinematography solver, a character scaffold — and composes them. Nothing about a character or a shot is hardcoded; each is a point in a parameter space.
Explainer, cutscene, meme, comedy short, chart. The geometry and the caption voice change by field — never the pipeline, the contract, or the review method.
Every title below is one self-contained HTML page — three.js embedded, zero fetched assets. The loop you see is the real render; open any film to run the live scene. Each is tagged with the primitives an agent composed it from.
Read the primitive chips on each film. Nothing there is bespoke: gait is one function that plants feet from distance travelled — biped and quadruped differ only by phase offset. A character is a point in proportion space plus a material choice, never a shipped mascot. A look is one object switched by one line. That is the whole bet — build primitives that generalize, and any register becomes cheap to shoot and re-shoot.
The skill ships the building blocks and the discipline. Any harness — Claude or otherwise — reads them and directs a film: it writes a beats table, scaffolds a scene, reviews it on three axes, passes an automated gate, and delivers. Here is what it's handed.
The only place a timestamp exists. Named beats with accumulating durations; retiming is one edit. Every caption and camera keyframe derives from it.
Every shape authored in code, zero fetched assets. Even physics is closed-form — a drop is y₀ − k·(t−t₀)², evaluated from t, never integrated.
Cel, subsurface, physical glass, driven through node slots. GPU-computed MaterialX noise gives surfaces detail with no image files.
A cinematographer's vocabulary — subject, size ladder, angle, lens, cut — compiled onto the camera per frame. Raw keyframes are gone on purpose.
One parametric skeleton family. A proportion vector plus a material choice returns a posable rig — two-bone IK, planted gait, neck and tail chains.
The whole look — palette, exposure, post, lens, cut pace, camera energy — is one object, switched by one line. A hex literal left in a material is a look hiding from the switch.
Always on, pass-through by default. Bloom and depth-of-field are STYLE flags; rack focus is two shots differing only in focus, joined by a blend.
Contact sheets, squint strips, motion profiles, and an automated gate. The lint can reject a scene; it can never approve one. Looking is the method.
Write the beats as text. Check meaning while it's still words — a beat you can't follow is a slideshow.
→Geometry, materials, characters, shots assembled into a self-contained HTML scene on the window contract.
→Composition (inside a frame), continuity (between frames), semantics (captions covered). Looking, not filenames.
→Determinism, a shipped-frame check, aspect containment. The automated floor before any full shoot.
→HTML, MP4, WebP, AVIF — chosen at spec time. Whatever ships, the one scene file stays the source.
The lesson from every film is the same: don't copy a walk cycle per creature — parameterize the gait. One function plants feet from distance travelled; two legs and four legs are the same function with different phase offsets. The character scaffold ships anatomy; the scene ships character. That is what makes a new register cheap to generate, and cheap to re-shoot.
The scene is a pure function of t. Tooling talks only to a fixed window contract, never to scene internals. Hold those two, and one file is at once the live artifact, the render source — and, later, an interactive experience for free.
Every phase raises the ceiling for all registers at once, because it lands as a reusable primitive — a material pack, a rig generalization, a bake step — not a one-off asset. Here is what exists and what comes next.
The node-stack templates, recorder, and instruments — gated green on both backends. Cel, subsurface, and glass material packs, verified under byte-determinism.
One parametric skeleton family with two-bone IK, distance-driven gait, neck and tail chains, and fur/fabric packs. A bear, a human, and an invented creature from one buildCharacter.
A face morph basis, an expression library, hands, and hair. The bar: expressions carry the beat in the caption-covered pass — the words are not doing the work. Scaffolded as generalizable primitives, not per-character rigs.
A build-time simulation step: simulate once, bake to keyframes, play back pure. Cloth, secondary motion, and soft contact — with runtime determinism fully intact.
Cutscene and meme film-language extensions; then an input driver over the unchanged kernel — the same characters, materials, and camera solver, now responding to events instead of a clock.
mitate installs as a Claude Code plugin. Point it at any input, in any register, and it directs — spec, scaffold, review, gate, deliver.
$ /plugin marketplace add fblissjr/mitate $ /plugin install mitate@mitate