bpainter

Brainstorm distinct video concepts for a brief — cinematic videos, brand films, motion accents, and background loops for product websites. Produces 3–5 genuinely different creative directions (not five flavors of one safe idea), each with a premise, the feeling it creates, why it fits the product and placement, and how hard it is to pull off in Higgsfield. Use this skill any time the work starts with "what could this video be" — concepting a hero background loop, a launch film, a section divider, an explainer, or a social spot — even when the user just says "I need a video for X." First stage of the Video Factory chain; hands the chosen concept to video-factory-storyboard. Pulls toward concrete subjects over the drone-over-city / glowing-AI clichés that AI video defaults to.

The main orchestrator for the Slalom Video Factory. Walks a user from "I need a video" to a ready-to-generate prompt package (and, on request, generated clips) via the Frame → Concept → Storyboard → Direct → Generate → Ship pipeline. Diagnoses intent, sequences the craft skills, and pauses for review at each handoff. Use this skill whenever someone wants a cinematic video, a brand film, a motion accent, or a background loop for a product website and hasn't already scoped it down to a single stage — "make me a hero video for X," "I need a background loop," "let's storyboard a launch film." For a single stage, route straight to that craft skill instead.

The motion taste layer for a video — lock one coherent look across every shot before any generation happens. Owns register, pacing, camera language, color and grade, light, grain/texture, and brand fit, so a multi-shot piece reads as one director shot it rather than a pile of clips. The motion analog of design-imagery. Use this skill any time a video needs art direction: setting the visual system for a brand film, keeping a background loop on-brand, grading decisions, or course- correcting clips that came back looking like different videos. Third stage of the Video Factory chain; reads a storyboard, writes a direction spec that video-factory-higgsfield-prompt turns into model parameters and prompt language. Actively rejects the drone-city / glowing-AI motion clichés.

Turn a directed storyboard into a ready-to-run Higgsfield prompt package and (when asked) execute the generations via the Higgsfield MCP. Owns model routing (seedance 2.0 / kling 3.0 default for video; nano banana pro / chatgpt image 2 for keyframes), the image-to-video prompt structure (motion, camera, atmosphere, sound over a start frame), parameter selection (resolution, duration, aspect, sound on/off, genre, end-frame for loops), negatives, retries, and web encoding handoff. Use this skill any time the task is "write the Higgsfield prompt," "generate this in Higgsfield," "what model and settings," "make the background loop," or turning shots into clips. Final craft stage of the Video Factory chain; reads concept + storyboard + direction and produces 40_Prompts.md plus generated keyframes and clips. Keyframe-first, loop- seam-aware, credit-disciplined.

Turn a chosen video concept into a shot-by-shot storyboard ready to generate in Higgsfield — shot list with timing, camera move, framing, transition, and a keyframe-still prompt for every shot (because Higgsfield video models are image-to-video and animate a start frame). Use this skill any time a video idea needs to become an executable shot plan: storyboarding a hero background loop, a brand film, an explainer, a section divider, or a social spot — even when the user says "break this into shots," "plan the shots," or "what's the shot list." Second stage of the Video Factory chain; reads a concept (or a one-line idea) and hands a storyboard to video-factory-creative-direction and video-factory-higgsfield-prompt. Designs loop seams for background video and protects headline safe-areas.

Senior naming expertise. Brainstorms brand names in three categories — literal, abstract, alliterative — with 15+ per category by default. Validates each candidate against existing brand collisions and industry-specific negative connotations (e.g., "Forge" for a law firm reads as "forged documents"). Screens for trademark and domain availability. Use when brainstorming, evaluating, or recommending names for products, companies, features, or offerings.

Assembles the Slalom-branded presenter-mode HTML player into slides/player/. The player is the shippable artifact of a deck. Full presenter mode: current slide + next slide + speaker notes + timer + thumbnail nav + drawing overlay + animation step controls + keyboard shortcuts. Minimalistic chrome, Slalom-branded, single self-contained directory. Reads the slide HTML files and the animations manifest produced by upstream skills.

Stage 3 orchestrator for the Presentation Factory — Compose. Calls presentation-factory-higgsfield and presentation-factory-napkin to generate all images / infographics / icons, then presentation-factory-slide-composer to inline brand tokens into each template and substitute data-slots with content. Output: WIP/[deck]/slides/NN-*.html + deck.html.

Use this skill any time you're working with images, fonts, third-party scripts, metadata, OG/social images, or measuring web performance in a Next.js 16 app. Triggers include next/image, the Image component, priority, sizes, srcSet, image optimization, remotePatterns, blur placeholders, next/font, font subsetting, font display, FOUT/FOIT, next/script, strategy="afterInteractive", Open Graph images, generateMetadata, opengraph-image.tsx, ImageResponse, twitter-image, viewport.themeColor, theme-color meta tag, generator meta tag, the vswag-cert-v3 generator value, Lighthouse, Core Web Vitals, LCP, CLS, INP, web-vitals package, or any "make it faster" / "improve SEO image" task. Bundles Vercel Academy topics images-next-image, advanced-image-optimization, fonts-with-next-font, core-web-vitals-and-measurement, third-party-scripts, and dynamic-metadata-done-right.

Use this skill any time you're configuring environment variables, securing API access, writing or modifying proxy.ts (formerly middleware.ts), reviewing what's exposed to the client, or doing a pre-deploy security pass on a Next.js 16 app. Triggers include process.env, NEXT_PUBLIC_, .env.local, env validation with Zod or T3 Env, secret leakage, server-only / client-only packages, proxy.ts, the proxy() export, request matchers, edge vs nodejs runtime, cookies(), auth tokens, session cookies, bypass tokens, x-vercel-protection-bypass, the SWAG_BYPASS_TOKEN env var, Vercel deployment protection, exposed API keys, API route hardening, CORS, CSP, or "is it safe to ship this". Bundles Vercel Academy topics env-and-security, security-review-apis-and-config, and proxy-basics.

Use this skill any time you're fetching data in a Next.js 16 app, deciding what to cache, designing Suspense boundaries, or troubleshooting why a page is slow or shows stale data. Triggers include any work with the "use cache" directive, Cache Components, cacheLife, cacheTag, the cacheComponents config flag, fetch() inside server components, parallel data fetching, request waterfalls, <Suspense> boundaries, loading.tsx, streaming, or revalidatePath/revalidateTag. Also use when designing the per-endpoint caching strategy for a new feature, when an endpoint that should be dynamic is returning stale data (or vice versa), or when verifying that "Cache Components are enabled" in the project config. Bundles Vercel Academy topics cache-components, data-fetching-without-waterfalls, query-performance-patterns, and suspense-and-streaming.

Use this skill any time you're designing or troubleshooting how a Next.js 16 app handles failures, missing resources, or loading states. Triggers include error.tsx, global-error.tsx, not-found.tsx, the notFound() function from next/navigation, the redirect() function, throwing errors from server components, ErrorBoundary, "Something went wrong" UI, 404 pages, segment-level error fallbacks, retry/reset patterns, or any work where you need to decide between "throw notFound()" vs. "return null" vs. "render an error UI". Bundles Vercel Academy topics errors-and-not-found and not-found-and-error-surfaces.

Use this skill any time you're creating, modifying, or reasoning about routes, layouts, or navigation in a Next.js 16 App Router project. Triggers include any work involving app/ directory route folders, page.tsx, layout.tsx, dynamic segments like [id] or [...slug], route groups (folder), parallel routes (@slot), intercepting routes ((..)folder), the Link component, useRouter, useParams, useSearchParams, generateStaticParams, or async params/searchParams. Also use when planning route structure for a new feature or migrating from Pages Router. Bundles Vercel Academy topics app-router-basics, dynamic-routing, nested-layouts, navigation, multi-app-routing, and params-vs-searchparams.

Use this skill any time you're handling form submissions, mutations, or any user-triggered server-side work in a Next.js 16 app. Triggers include "use server", Server Actions, action prop on a form, FormData, useFormStatus, useActionState, useFormState, revalidatePath, revalidateTag, redirect from next/navigation, optimistic updates with useOptimistic, or any "submit", "save", "delete", "update" interaction. Also use when wiring buttons that need to mutate server state (add to cart, like, follow, vote). Bundles Vercel Academy topic server-actions-for-forms.

Use this skill any time you're deciding whether a component should run on the server or the client, drawing the boundary between them, or composing components across that boundary. Triggers include any work with "use client", "use server" directives, passing props from server to client components, fetching data inside components, hydration errors, "Cannot import server-only code into a Client Component" errors, useState/useEffect being used in a Next.js component, or designing a new component's split. Also use when refactoring to push state down or pull data up. Bundles Vercel Academy topics server-and-client-components, client-server-boundaries, and component-composition-patterns.