Taste

Most AI video advice stops at how to render frames. This skill is the layer above that: what the frames should look like, in what order, cut to what rhythm, so the result reads as one intentional thing instead of a pile of generations.

It encodes a specific taste — the angelcore / cloud-trance / hyperpop family (Bladee "Silver Surfer"-era ethereal trance crossed with heavy angelcore) — distilled from a corpus of saved Reels and a tour through a ~70-entry visual-genre library. It is opinionated on purpose. Taste is a point of view, not a menu.

The companion file references/genre-taxonomy.md holds the full named-genre catalog. This file is the actionable layer: mood, grammar, pipeline, and a beat-mapped shot plan.

When to Activate

• Building a music video, lyric video, fancam, or visualizer.
• Making a short-form edit / reel where the feel matters more than the information.
• Driving AI b-roll generation (fal.ai, Veo, Kling, etc.) and the prompts need a coherent direction instead of one-off vibes.
• Assembling a moodboard or choosing a visual genre before any rendering.
• The user says "taste", "make it feel like X", "give it a direction", "angelcore", "cloud trance", "hyperpop edit", "Bladee", "dreamcore", or names a saved reference.
• The current edit works but reads as flat, generic, AI-slop, or stylistically incoherent.

This skill sits on top of video-editing (the mechanics) and remotion-video-creation (the renderer). Use those for how. Use this for what and why.

Core Thesis

1. Taste is the last layer, and it must be decided first. video-editing correctly says taste is the final human pass. The trap: if you only decide taste at the end, every generation and cut upstream was a guess. Pick the direction before the first prompt, then let it constrain everything.
2. Coherence beats novelty. One look executed across 30 shots beats 30 looks. A named genre (below) is a constraint that buys coherence for free.
3. Cut to the song, not to the footage. In a music video the timeline is the waveform. Every hard cut lands on a beat or a transient. Frame math is in the pipeline section.
4. Generate selectively, edit ruthlessly. AI makes b-roll that does not exist; it does not make taste. You still throw away 80%.

The Aesthetic Vocabulary (distilled)

The reference corpus tours a large library of named visual genres. The full list lives in references/genre-taxonomy.md. The useful move is not memorizing 70 names — it is seeing that a genre name is a complete prompt-and-grade preset. When you pick one, you inherit its palette, texture, lighting, and subject matter as a unit.

The genres cluster into families. Pick a primary family and at most one accent:

For the current project, the primary is Ethereal / divine with a Hyperpop / Y2K-cyber accent — i.e. holy light and crystalline bloom, punctuated by chrome and neon. That pairing is the angelcore × cloud-trance brief.

The Mood System — angelcore × cloud-trance

Distilled directly from the strongest reference reels. This is the concrete grade.

Palette

• Base: near-black void (#05060a) and bone white (#f4f1ea). Most frames are one or the other.
• Divine accent: molten gold / ember orange (#ffb24d → #ff7a18) — the one warm light in the dark.
• Crystalline accent: iridescent violet→cyan→magenta bokeh (#8a6bff, #4fc3ff, #ff6ad5) — the hyperpop bloom, used in bright frames.
• Danger accent (sparingly): a single glowing red (#ff2a2a) on monochrome — for one or two shock cuts only.

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