Taste profiles

Palette, type, motion, pacing and texture — and what stingo decides for you.

A taste profile is the other half of a film. The script says what you are talking about; the taste says what it looks and feels like. Neither mentions the other.

stingo render script.yaml --taste dusk
stingo render script.yaml --taste ./ember.json

Same script, different film.

#What a taste sets, and what it does not

This is the distinction the whole system rests on.

A taste declares intent: a brand colour, light or dark, a mood, a density. Everything a designer would call a relationship — type ratios, spacing rhythm, contrast floors, the lightness ramp of the neutrals, the order things animate in — lives in the house style and is not the taste's to set.

That is why two different profiles still look like stingo videos, and why a badly chosen palette still produces a readable one.

#Deriving one

You should almost never write a palette by hand:

stingo taste "#ff7a18" --name Ember --mood bouncy --texture film --save ember.json

  ████ bg          #130905  ground
  ████ text        #fef1ea  17.8:1
  ████ muted       #a9826e  5.7:1
  ████ accent      #ef7e39  7.2:1
  ████ accent2     #2ecaf5  10.2:1

What it actually does with your hex:

• Places every neutral on a measured OKLab lightness ramp, taken from the reference theme rather than guessed, so derived palettes feel the same.
• Bleeds a trace of your hue into those neutrals. That is what makes a palette read as authored rather than as grey with an accent bolted on.
• Normalises the accent to a target lightness and chroma, so any brand hue lands with comparable punch instead of whatever you happened to type.
• Derives a support hue by rotation, unless you give one with --support.
• Locks semantic colours to fixed hues, so green reads as success in every taste.
• Lifts anything failing the contrast floors, and tells you what it moved.

The colours on this documentation site are the output of that command.

#palette

#type

type:
  display: { family: JetBrains Mono, weight: 800, tracking: -0.03, lineHeight: 1.05 }
  body:    { family: Inter, weight: 400, lineHeight: 1.45 }
  mono:    { family: JetBrains Mono, weight: 400, lineHeight: 1.55 }
  scale: 1

transform (none · upper · lower) is available per face. scale multiplies every size at once.

Sizes themselves are not yours to set: they come from one modular ratio applied consistently, which is most of what separates designed typography from arbitrary font sizes.

Fonts are read from assets/fonts as static .ttf/.otf. Variable fonts are skipped with a warning — satori's parser cannot read an fvar table.

#motion

The single knob that most changes how a video feels.

Personality maps to a curve and a travel distance, and the mapping is the house's, so snappy means the same thing in every profile.

#pacing

cutOn: bar is what makes every cut land on a downbeat. Camera scenes ignore it by default — see talking head.

#texture

Cheap to render, enormous effect on whether a video looks made.

None of these are SVG filters. A feGaussianBlur over two megapixels costs about 9.5 seconds a frame. Grain, vignette and scanlines are a lookup table built once and applied to the RGBA buffer in a tight loop — a few milliseconds.

#transition and music

transition: { kind: fade, duration: 0.25 }
music: { energy: medium, duckDb: -12, targetLufs: -14 }

kind is cut · fade · wipe · whip · glitch · slide, and duration is half the move.

stingo renders one scene per frame, so a true crossfade — two scenes alive at once — would double the cost of every boundary. Each move is split instead: the outgoing scene plays the first half over its last duration seconds, the incoming scene plays the second half over its first, and both push the same way so the pair reads as one gesture. That is why duration: 0.25 gives a half-second transition.

glitch is the exception that runs on pixels rather than markup, because SVG cannot express a channel split cheaply. It is seeded from the scene index and the frame, so every worker in a parallel render tears the same frame identically.

One interaction to know about: a block's own elements already fade out over motion.exit at the end of a scene. With a short scene and a long motion.exit, the type can be gone before a slide or whip has travelled far, and the move reads as weaker than it is. Shorten motion.exit if you want the push to carry the content rather than an empty frame.

targetLufs is the loudness the final mix is normalised to; −14 is what the platforms want.

#Checking one

stingo doctor ./ember.json

Audits against the house floors — body 7:1, muted 4.5:1, accents 4.5:1 — and reports which failures are repaired automatically at render time.

Body text sits well above the WCAG 4.5 minimum on purpose: video is watched small, on phones, often in daylight.