# Prismatic Atlas · 棱彩图谱 A science idea becomes a colorful, inhabited world. Move between a dense place, a readable mechanism and a small diagram; the camera changes scale because the explanation needs a different relationship to become visible. ## Visual grammar Use saturated indigo and violet for diagram space, with cyan, teal, coral, pink and warm yellow for the active subject. Bright green, blue or coral grounds can carry environment and comparison scenes. Preserve distinct color families at thumbnail size. White is a highlight, not the default fill for every object. Build crisp vector silhouettes with two or three deliberate shadow facets. Most objects have no black outline. Use local glow for emitted light or a highlighted relationship, never as a full-screen haze. Avoid texture, paper grain, lens blur and photoreal shading. Small marks should describe a material or population, not merely decorate the background. Isometric tiles, shallow extruded forms and translucent layers explain location, containment and scale. Depth order must remain coherent during movement. Keep one dominant subject in close shots; populate wide environments with meaningful secondary activity. An endless run of isolated central icons misses the style. People and organisms are authored for each production. Keep face, pose, costume and expressive silhouettes consistent. Establish anticipation, action and a settling pose; eyes, hands and held objects must track the same target. Do not reuse a reference's recognizable cast, logos or designs. ## Camera and motion - Use a persistent object to connect scales. Let its motion motivate the next frame, then reveal the new context around it. - Alternate dense environments, character/object interactions, isolated mechanisms, isometric arrays and compact comparisons. - Hold a diagram while its causal process changes. A slow whole-frame zoom is not a substitute for growth, transfer, collision, sorting or transformation. - Separate primary and secondary motion. Background activity stays quieter and slower than the action being explained. - Use object wipes, scale transitions, occlusion and direct cuts as appropriate; avoid applying one transition to every boundary. - Derive state from the integer frame, not accumulated playback time. Read the source frame rate and motion cadence before choosing the output cadence. For a change of scale, preserve an identifiable part of the outgoing scene. Reveal its surrounding structure through one camera transform or draw a visible connection between the source region and its enlarged detail. Plan the order: establish the part, expose the relationship, settle the new scale, then label it. Do not replace a spatial relationship with two unrelated images dissolving over one another. A diagram can hold still while the narration explains it; reserve large changes for an actual change in what the viewer needs to understand. For a push into a detail, magnify the actual retained geometry and keep its child roots in the same coordinates. Review the largest projected size before encoding: small decorative facets can become broken-looking protrusions in a close view. Let local arrivals or transfers target the newly changing part, and keep labels in screen space so they remain readable during the camera move. Retire ground shadows when a grounded solid becomes a front-facing diagram; a formerly hidden shadow can otherwise cover the enlarged subject. Derive attachment positions from the parent's final, clamped geometry. Sharing an origin is insufficient if the parent shortens its outer segments while child anchors still use their nominal lengths. Check newly emerging parts at the maximum camera scale, where even a small mismatch can become a visible detached fragment. When a camera reveals a person beside the object, inspect the intermediate crop. A raised prop can enter long before its owner's face and read as a detached limb. Keep the entering silhouette compact, then perform the explanatory gesture after the person is established. Use a shared hand anchor for the prop throughout. ## Comparative arrays Keep a selected object from the prior setting while the surrounding apparatus withdraws. Give comparison objects distinct silhouettes and shallow supporting planes, then introduce them in an order tied to the explanation. Plan each entry path against the occupied silhouettes; a rear object need not travel through a foreground support to reach its final layer. Start an incoming silhouette fully outside the crop, or explicitly animate its reveal; a nonzero progress flag alone can make a full-sized object pop into the first active frame. Inspect the intermediate crossings and align arrival sounds to visible events. A support highlight belongs below its contents in the paint order. Derive solid placement from its transformed lowest point, and keep labels clear of both the object and the full gesture trajectory. A material distinction named by the voice must be visible in the geometry, including cavities or interior surfaces. Do not depend on a caption to supply a missing visual distinction. To carry a selected model into a new setting, remove it from the retiring group's transform while preserving its final screen position, scale and rotation. Move the old context away, establish the new context, then begin the next action. Treat context entry, subject travel and structural change as separate events so their timing stays readable. Retire old labels before introducing a new title. Check the retained silhouette against every background it crosses; continuity alone does not preserve attention when subject and background share a value. ## Acting and physical contact Give a character a target and an action. Gaze, head direction, elbow, hand and held object must support the same intention. A prop beside a character is not an interaction; its grip and viewing axis need to make sense throughout motion. Use one parent transform for a limb and its attached object. Vary anticipation, contact and settling poses deliberately instead of running every joint on an unrelated sine wave. For a contact event, author a trajectory that ends at the receiving surface. Derive both endpoints from the same transformed anchor; match size and rotation at the hand-off. The object should not teleport or grow into existence unless that is the process being explained. Tie the contact sound to that event frame. Surface deposits and fragments need local coordinates that move with their parent, and joined objects need coherent relative motion. For procedural growth, derive each child root from the parent's actual geometry, then grow outward from that fixed root. Draw joining geometry in a coherent layer order and skip zero-area polygons. Check the earliest visible frame as well as the completed form: a final pose can hide detached parts during construction. In a mixed raster/vector environment, moving inhabitants and instruments must use the plate's coordinate system and camera transform. Verify feet, shadows, railings and foreground occlusion. A small number of meaningful local actions can support a wide composition; enlarging a flat image does not add local motion. Preserve inherited opacity inside every nested drawing function, or an outgoing layer may leave fully opaque props behind during a fade. For an opaque character or solid, fading each overlapping primitive separately can expose internal overlaps like an unintended transparent model. Fade a composited group or stage a spatial exit. Check the halfway pose, where this fault is easier to see than at either endpoint. For a fully authored environment, keep terrain, paths, structures and inhabitants in one persistent world coordinate system. A surface needs two independent axes; parallel length and width vectors collapse an apparent platform into a line. Place structures by their supporting footprint, not a visually convenient center. Treat railings, containers and their occupants as a local depth group: rear structure, contents or actors, then front structure. Sorting every element by a single global y coordinate does not resolve this containment relationship. Keep walking routes clear of building footprints. Check feet across the full trajectory, then inspect selected native frames for apparent wall climbing or incorrect foreground occlusion; a collision-free point alone is insufficient. Use crisp, limited color facets at both environment and character scales. Give local movement a physical anchor and a purpose: transport follows its channel, a mounted instrument rotates about its support, and foliage bends above a fixed root. Preserve quiet areas so dense detail does not flatten the subject hierarchy. ## Controlled systems and shared state For an inhabited mechanism, connect the operator, control, transport path and visible consequence. Derive each indicator and response from the same named state and frame event. Stage the control first, transport next and material response last, with deliberately authored delays. Extra detail should explain a relationship; unrelated moving ornaments weaken the causal story. Choose a common coordinate system for a control and its grip. When a character is mirrored, transform the control angle as well as the hand position. Use the actual lower support point when placing a growing or rotating solid on a surface; center alignment alone can leave a changing object floating or penetrating its base. Render rear walls, contents and front structure in a consistent order. For a move from operation to explanation, let the hand release its control and indicate the result. Preserve limb lengths with a constrained joint solution, and keep the grip fixed while the rest of the pose changes. Aim a pointing finger from its current hand location toward the actual target, rather than using a fixed decorative angle. Frame both the establishing view and the explanatory close view. If a camera moves to a new speaker or result, author the departing character's follow-through as well. A limb left alone at the image edge is a staging fault even when the underlying geometry is connected correctly. Inspect the movement, not only its two endpoint compositions. ## Labels and sound Compact white, bold sans labels sit on simple colored rectangles near what they name. Use type sparingly. Resolve scientific terms in the spoken explanation; labels should not become a second competing paragraph. Keep optional subtitles as a separate track when the reference picture has no persistent caption strip. Sound has four independent roles: voice, original or licensed score, ambience, and action cues. A cue derives from the same named frame event as its visible cause. Shape the score across the argument, vary instrumentation and intensity, leave intentional quiet, and duck it under speech. Do not mistake a collection of generic beeps for a composed score. Preserve stems for revision. ## Typical use Suitable for explaining an unseen mechanism by travelling from a familiar object into its parts, showing a causal change and returning to the whole. The content contract is empty: choose a new subject, claims, characters, locations, composition and score for each production. ## Review Read [the frame comparison method](../../methods/frame-style-comparison.md). Exhaustive numerical scans and image atlases are useful evidence, but do not certify aesthetic equality. Track viewed frames, sequential motion review, listening and technical delivery checks separately. Fix observed differences in geometry, staging, timing and mix before producing another full export. This is an authoring toolkit. A separately published film demonstrates one production; it does not certify exact style equality or supply scenes for a new subject. See [provenance](PROVENANCE.md).