# Race, speed and faceless kinetic montage

Domain grammar for dynamic race spots — drag, drift, chase, drag-strip, kinetic montage. The brief is brutal: faces are banned, the deliverable is **still keyframes (opornye kadry)** for an animatic, and a frozen panel must read as lethal velocity at a glance. Speed is not a post effect — it is a photographic fact built from spatial cues that imply the missing motion. Emotion does not live on a face; it rides on metal, rubber, road, gauges and light. Load this file when the task involves racing, drift, drag, chase, speed, dynamic or kinetic montage, "гонщик", or "раскадровка гонки".

This file **specializes `animatic-keyframes.md` for the race domain.** That file owns the general still-panel method and is the prerequisite read: the keyframe card, the **six motion-as-still cues** (§4), the **5-cue speed budget** (§4), the **EMOTION→OBJECT substitution table** and state-change cheat-sheet (§5), the loaded-frame depth method (§6), the **density ladder** (§3), the **keyframe→image-gen prompt skeleton** (§7), the worked 30s board (§8), and the **master per-panel checklist** (§9). This file does **not** repeat them — it adds the race grammar on top: the schools, the start-line liturgy, the shot families, the drift ritual, the Christmas-Tree light logic, and the cold-combat palette. Where the method is general, this file points; where it is race-specific, it teaches.

Sits on top of `dramaturgy.md` (§2 Details Law, §3 fantik, §9 environment, §11 shot card, §12 rhythm ladder, §15 check), `universal-rules.md` (U1–U12), `role-modes.md` §4 (shot-function taxonomy). Pairs with `camera-lighting-vocabulary.md` for framing/lens/light tokens, `patterns-and-genres.md` for the action/escalation arc, and `seedance.md` / `kling.md` / `veo.md` to animate each locked keyframe.

## Contents

1. Core laws (the non-negotiables)
2. Four schools worth stealing
3. Selling speed in a single frame
4. Storytelling without faces — the race captioning system
5. The race ritual (liturgy) + the 5 shot families
6. Camera grammar for speed
7. Light & color for speed without faces
8. Sound & rhythm
9. 30-second structure (beat map)
10. Anti-fake guard

---

## 1. Core laws (the non-negotiables)

Six laws govern every race panel. Break one and the spot collapses to a car commercial.

1. **Authentic speed, never CGI-clean or sped-up.** Build velocity into the static composition (§3); never lean on a ramp to rescue a dead frame. Over-crank, glass-smooth stabilization and post speed-ramps read subconsciously as "ad-speed" and drain all threat. Squat, lifted nose, slick wrinkle, smeared rim — the physics has to be visible in the still.
2. **Detail is the emotion.** Faces banned, feeling renders only on a knuckle, a needle, a pedal, smoke, or a sweat bead (`dramaturgy.md` §2; the full substitution method is `animatic-keyframes.md` §5). A hand mid-grip is the no-face equivalent of a close-up on the eyes. No abstract "motion", no named feeling.
3. **One governing visual promise per piece.** A 30s cut earns cohesion from a single conceit: everything through reflections in painted metal, or everything through circles (tach → headlight → bulb → wheel), or everything as machine-talks / no-music. Kon's "one visual principle". Name it before boarding.
4. **Beat-locked cutting.** Loudness in the audio = shot count on the board (§8; the density ladder itself is `animatic-keyframes.md` §3). Silence = one held panel. Bang = a burst of 4–8-frame micro-panels. Cut length is engine RPM made visual: idle = long panels, redline = collapsing panels toward the green.
5. **Cold combative palette** (§7). Steel blue, cyan, magenta, dirty mercury-white; **red as danger accent only** (brake glow, redline, tail-lights, the Tree's bulbs). No warm cozy amber wash — warmth appears only as toxin. Steal Tony Scott's grain, contrast and overexposure; **discard his warm grade.**
6. **Every insert is load-bearing.** Each detail panel must be captionable with one race label — *setup / commitment / mistake / recovery / proof-of-speed / result* (§4). If you cannot label it, it is a *fantik* (`dramaturgy.md` §3) — drop it. A board that is all proof-of-speed with no commitment/mistake/recovery is a reel, not a story.

---

## 2. Four schools worth stealing

Four traditions, compressed. Each ends in its one transferable rule.

**Kinetic montage (Wright, Ritchie, Boyle, Scott, Vaughn, Raimi, Aronofsky).** Time is elastic, every prop is a trigger, prep is an event. A keyframe cannot ramp or whip — so each moving trick compresses into one frozen cue (the six cues are catalogued in `animatic-keyframes.md` §4). Aronofsky's hip-hop montage is the single most transferable engine for prep-without-faces: a 6–9-panel ultra-CU strip of the start ritual, each panel one beat with a locked sound cue, the cluster **repeated two-to-three times with escalation** (calm → strained → violent). Repetition is memory; memory is emotion.
→ **Rule:** never write "motion" — write the artifact motion leaves behind, and never board a neutral panel (every frame carries a forward vector, negative space ahead of the subject).

**Race-truth (Frankenheimer, Lelouch, Mangold/Papamichael, Howard/Dod Mantle, Refn).** Speed is a fact you earn by putting the camera where a real rig could bolt — bumper, hood lip, hostess-tray, axle, cabin. Low, wide and close, hard-mounted without vibration isolation so "cheeks shake", asphalt streaking in frame as the speedometer, mini-cams next to pistons and swelling tires for "an electron-microscope view of the car at its limit". Refn's cocoon: silence and stillness inside the shell, chaos outside, so the launch detonates. Refuse the crank — *Grand Prix* oiled tires for real smoke rather than fake the burnout.
→ **Rule:** if the implied camera could not physically mount on the car, the panel reads as render — drop it to bumper height and bolt it on.

**Loaded composition (Bong, Park, Anderson, Kon).** With no faces, geometry and the depth stack do the acting (the FG/MG/BG depth method is `animatic-keyframes.md` §6). One geometric spine (centerline or Christmas Tree as the axis); every object an evidence (Park: "each object is a clue") or it is cut. Symmetry is handwriting — one held symmetric "breath" frame says balanced rivalry; break it the instant one car noses ahead. Kon's graphic-match pairs compress time across two adjacent keyframes sharing a shape at the same size and screen position.
→ **Rule:** a panel answers one question in the first glance and rewards a second look — one focal point, one emotion, three depth layers, zero dead objects.

**Rule-based ad (Honda *Cog*, Audi Quattro, Nike/Ritchie, Goodyear).** The drama is pure mechanism: every object does something irreversible, "let the machine talk" (no music), the entire spot first-person with no hero face. Tension is "will it fire". A static fetish shot of a gear lever flatlines; an object crossing a threshold says a decision just happened.
→ **Rule:** objects carry feeling only when they visibly **change state** — board the "after" (needle pinned in the red, ignition lamp blooming live, slick caught mid-fold), the "before" is implied.

---

## 3. Selling speed in a single frame

A still has no engine note and zero motion. It sells velocity through the **speed-budget rule** — a frame reads fast only when **≥3 of five cues coexist** (camera at/below bumper height · asphalt streaking the lower frame · a near foreground reference passing the edge · sharp hero against motion-blurred background · a mechanical-vibration cue). The full rule, with the anti-fake firewall, lives in `animatic-keyframes.md` §4; do not re-derive it. One cue is a car photo; three is velocity; five and even a parked car reads dangerous. If a "fast" panel can't name three, reframe lower, drag the camera to the asphalt, throw a barrier into the foreground.

Two race-domain extensions the general file does not carry:

**The foreground reference catalog** (cue *c*, the cheapest and strongest speed multiplier). Place the reference *near the lens* (so it smears most) and *passing the edge* (so it reads as transiting, not parked). Keep one near object tack-sharp so the brain measures the smear against it.

| Reference object | Where to place it | Speed it implies |
|---|---|---|
| Cone / timing block | near edge, elongated/smeared | lane-level rush |
| Armco barrier / wall | scraping the near side, streaked | proximity + velocity |
| Lane stripe / chevron | lower frame, smeared toward bottom | ground speed |
| Christmas-Tree pylon | foreground, sharp anchor; car blurred | launch reference + timer |
| Tree / lamp post / grandstand | whipping past, motion-rod | open-road pace |
| Tire smoke / spray | raked by backlight across frame | force + air movement |
| Marshal / crowd at periphery | blurred, fragmented | scale + danger |

**Long-lens compression** — the second speed register and the antidote to "only blur sells speed". Frankenheimer's 1000mm stacked distant cars onto the hero so closing distance reads as collapse. Pair compression panels with low-wide panels in the cut; never board the whole spot on one lens. In `seedance.md`/`veo.md` syntax name "motion blur, fast-shutter look on background, sharp subject" explicitly — models default to over-clean stabilization (the prompt skeleton is `animatic-keyframes.md` §7).

(The full "what kills the speed" audit lives once, in §10.)

---

## 4. Storytelling without faces — the race captioning system

A face does four jobs: internal state, where it looks, the cost, the decision. Banned, those jobs redistribute — **decision → anatomy mid-action; internal state → an object crossing a threshold; looking/rivalry → space.** The mechanism, the EMOTION→OBJECT substitution table and the state-change cheat-sheet are owned by `animatic-keyframes.md` §5; do not duplicate them. Two filters before you draw: name the **verb** on any hand/foot panel (grip / latch / shift / preload / release — no verb, no panel), and board only the **after** state of any object threshold (Honda *Cog*). Pick ONE hero object and board it three times at rising intensity — beats twelve unrelated inserts (`dramaturgy.md` §13).

What this file owns is the **race captioning system** — the margin label that proves an insert is load-bearing (Law 6). Every detail keyframe gets exactly one. If you cannot assign one, drop the panel.

| Label | Story job | Typical object / crop | Skill tag (`role-modes.md` §4) |
|---|---|---|---|
| **setup** | establishes capability / readiness | glove pull, harness latch, ignition dead | Establish / Detail |
| **commitment** | point of no return chosen | foot pins throttle, shifter rammed home, ignition live | Shift / Impact |
| **mistake** | something slips / over-limit | tire shake, wheel fights back, revs flare wrong | Pressure / Impact |
| **recovery** | control reclaimed | hand catches the correction, tach settles back into band | Shift |
| **proof-of-speed** | force is real, not staged | chassis squat, slick wrinkle, exhaust flame, asphalt streak | Power / Pressure |
| **result** | who won the inch | finish stripe, slicks ballooned at trap, one nose ahead, chute bloom | Impact / Aftermath |

(Banned panels are consolidated in §10.)

---

## 5. The race ritual (liturgy) + the 5 shot families

The race is not a chase, it is a *liturgy*. Every phase is a legible, irreversible state-change a knowing viewer reads instantly — muddle the order and the spot dies. The countdown *tightens cut length toward the green*, then explodes: the drag-specific instance of the `dramaturgy.md` §12 rhythm staircase. Draw one anchor keyframe per beat. In a faceless spot **Reaction** is reassigned from a human face to the *machine's* face — the needle jumping, the slick wrinkling, the nose squatting. Gauges and rubber are the actor.

| # | Ritual beat | Function | Keyframe to draw (still) | Light (cold) | Emotion |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Water box entry | Establish | Front slick easing into mirror-still water, chalk/box edge in frame, bulbs reflected in the sheet | Steel-blue dusk, wet specular | coiled stillness |
| 2 | Burnout (white→blue) | Power | Ground-level wall of smoke off the rear, plume backlit; car straining on line-lock | Hard cyan backlight through smoke | barely-leashed force |
| 3 | Reverse settle | Pressure | Rear rolling back through its own drifting smoke toward the beams, tail-lights bleeding red into haze | Smoke haze, low key, red tail wash | deliberate menace |
| 4 | Pre-stage bulb | Pressure | Front tyre creeping, top blue bulb lit as anchor, beam line as a graphic spine on asphalt | Blue bulb glow on wet metal | held breath |
| 5 | Stage bulb | Pressure | Second blue bulb lit, tyre on the line, knuckles whitening on wheel/trans-brake (depth: bulb BG, hand FG) | Two blue bulbs, deep black | point of no return |
| 6 | Amber countdown | Pressure→Shift | The Tree as timer — three ambers, sequential (see below) | Amber pulse (the only narrative warm light) | trigger tension |
| 7 | Green / launch | Impact | Both cars squatting on rear suspension, front wheels lifting, asphalt streaking back | Green flash + hard flare | release / violence |
| 8 | Slick wrinkle (hero) | Detail/Reaction | Macro into rear sidewall folding/wrinkling as it hooks — *the* hero detail, the held/ramp beat | Hard side light, smoke bloom | physics made visible |
| 9 | Shift / exhaust flame | Detail | Hand slamming shifter with chassis twist, OR header pipe spitting flame | Flame as warm spark in cold frame | escalation |
| 10 | The pass | Power | Joust / parallel tracking, asphalt streaking, rival lane in frame | Streaked specular, motion-rod lights | duel |
| 11 | Finish | Impact | Top-end: slicks "blown up"/distorted, cars inches apart crossing the line, one nose ahead | Cold-white finish pool | margin |
| 12 | Chutes / aftermath | Aftermath/Exit | Parachutes blooming, smoke drifting through headlight beams, OR hand unclenching off the wheel | Falling light, residue haze | consequence |

**Amber logic (decision point).** Choose the **Sportsman / full tree** for an ad: three ambers fire *sequentially 0.5s apart* — three drawable keyframes, a stretched drum-roll of dread with cut length collapsing toward the green. The Pro tree fires all three at once — one panel, brutal but no build. Draw the Sportsman stagger. Always leave on the **last amber, not the green** (holeshot): the launch keyframe precedes the green-lit panel by a frame, which makes it read as *anticipation*, not reaction.

**Drift adaptation — the slip-angle liturgy.** Drift swaps the countdown for a *continuous angle ritual*: **approach → entry → clutch-kick initiation → counter-steer hold → clipping point (wall proximity) → smoke wall → transition (flick) → exit.** The **counter-steer** replaces the slick-wrinkle as the "physics made visible" anchor — ECU/CU of hands wound into opposite lock, forearms crossed, wheel at full angle, cold side-light on knuckles, the steering angle drawn large and unmistakable. **Wall proximity** is danger without a face: barrier hard and sharp in the foreground layer, car door a hand's-width away, motion-streak on the wall texture — the gap *is* the emotion. The **transition flick** is yawed mid-switch, smoke crossing the frame diagonally, both exit directions readable.

### The 5 shot families

Rotate among all five across the 30s — speed reads through *changing perspective*, not long takes. Each family has one job and a default composition.

| # | Family | Job (function) | Put in the still panel | Authenticity tell |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | **Hostess-tray side profile** | Detail / Power | Side-mounted outside the door: hand on wheel/shifter, or rear-quarter wheel filling frame; asphalt streaking behind | door/window line anchors scale; rubber works in frame |
| 2 | **Hood / bumper low forward POV** | Pressure / Impact | Predatory low forward look: asphalt rushing under the nose, cones/Tree/markers growing fast, lane stripe strobing; fisheye edge optional | road texture under the car = velocity |
| 3 | **Hard-mounted cabin shake** | Pressure / Reaction | Rigid interior mount: dash/needle/hands vibrating, mirror trembling, world shuddering through glass | visible micro-vibration; never perfectly stable |
| 4 | **Tracking / chase parallel + joust** | Power / Reveal | Camera car alongside (parallel) or closing head-on offset (joust); rival lane in frame, roadside lights as streaks | closing distance + streaked surroundings |
| 5 | **Distant proof shot** | Establish / Aftermath | Long locked lens: two cars as small hard shapes crossing huge space, smoke trail, barriers narrowing perspective | space covered brutally fast; one breath of stillness |

---

## 6. Camera grammar for speed

The **six motion-as-still cues** (smear / partial blur / streak / vector / sharp-blur separation / held stillness) are catalogued in `animatic-keyframes.md` §4. This table is the complementary layer: the camera *move* the user names, resolved into one still composition. Format: technique — what it does to emotion — application in a keyframe/panel.

| Technique | What it does to emotion | Keyframe application (the still) | Tag |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Whip pan** | instant transfer of attention, reads as motion not a cut | Streak-frame between two clean panels: whole frame raked into horizontal streaks (Tree lamps, guardrail, lane stripes smeared), one shape barely surviving (a wheel arc, the shifter) | Shift |
| **Crash / snap zoom** | shock-shove into a detail; discovery, alarm | Aggressively tight macro of the trigger detail (needle slamming red, last amber bulb), faint radial/zoom-blur ring at edges, subject oversized dead-center | Detail / Impact |
| **Speed ramp** | punctuation: ramp = the breakout, freeze = exclamation mark | Frozen partial blur at the peak — sidewall wrinkle caught mid-deformation, smoke just blooming, everything else tack-sharp; one arrested ten-thousandth of a second | Impact |
| **Freeze frame** | a held breath / a one-frame dossier on an object | Deliberately blur-free locked macro, hard edges, margin caption (knuckles whitening, *committed*); the symmetrical "exhale" amid kinetic panels | Detail / Pressure |
| **POV (cockpit / impossible mount)** | identification; the viewer *is* in the car | Hands + wheel rim in hard foreground, cluster mid-ground, Tree/rival in blurred deep ground; 24mm exaggerated proximity; or genuinely impossible mount (wheel arch, exhaust mouth) | POV / Pressure |
| **Joust** | closing-distance rate spikes the sense of speed | Near head-on, car offset to one side, a cone/marker huge and blurred on the opposite edge to mark the closing gap; reserve for the climax pass | Impact |
| **Low macro (aggressor cam)** | the lens is a predator, the track attacks the frame | Bumper/grille-level skimming the asphalt, fisheye curvature at the edges, road lunging into the lens; or extreme CU under hard cold side-light — a knuckle becomes a ridge, the lever a weapon | Impact / POV / Detail |
| **Restless / handheld cam** | the frame never settles; constant threat, physiological unease | Never a perfectly level, perfectly clean panel — bake in a 1–3° drift, edge smear, off-true horizon, a faint micro-shake artifact even in a "static" cockpit | Pressure |
| **Dutch angle** | imbalance, loss of grip | Cant the horizon hard at the one loss-of-traction beat only (tyre breaking away, car stepping sideways) — reserve it so it stays loud | Impact |

Ration aggression: one bumper-fisheye lunge, one crash-zoom, one dutch — at commitment beats, not as wallpaper. Per `camera-lighting-vocabulary.md` §2, the animatic prompt supplies one dominant move per clip; the keyframe is the locked first frame.

---

## 7. Light & color for speed without faces

Faces are banned, so light is the only actor left. It does not "set a mood" — it **rims a material** so a piece of metal, rubber or skin reports the emotion a face would. General light grammar (sources, direction, quality) is `camera-lighting-vocabulary.md` §4–7; the anti-sterile firewall is `animatic-keyframes.md` §7 + `universal-rules.md` U12. The race-specific governing law: *embrace the dark* (crush blacks, ~70% of the frame unlit), *one motivated practical per panel* (Tree lamp, headlight, sodium lamp, brake glow), *light is specular not ambient* (every panel needs ≥1 hard specular hit — no specular, no information).

### The cold combative palette

| Color | Emotional job | Where it lives in the keyframe |
|---|---|---|
| Hard white / dirty mercury white | clinical pressure, the white-hot edge of commitment | top/side key on knuckles, metal lip; blown highlight on chrome |
| Cyan / electric teal | cold adrenaline, machine-alive | backlight through burnout smoke; spill on wet asphalt; rim on rear-quarter |
| Steel blue | night base, isolation, the void | negative space, deep shadow body, the unlit 70% |
| Magenta / cold violet | aggression, neon menace | practical sign spill on roofline; reflection ribbon down wet lane |
| **Red (accent only)** | danger, redline, point of no return | brake disc glow, tail-lights, Tree bulbs in lacquer, tach needle in the red |
| Green (accent only) | release, GO | the Tree's green bulb, its single reflection in a headlight lens or paint |
| Toxic amber/sodium (rationed) | temporary, contaminated, alien — never cozy | sodium lamp as a passing smear; spilled fluid catching one lamp; the Tree's three ambers as countdown only |

**Warmth as toxin** is the only permitted heat: brake-disc/exhaust glow (the machine at its thermal limit), a header flame stab gone in a frame, the Tree's alien ambers, a sickly sodium smear. Any warm element must be **point-source and surrounded by cold**. If amber fills more than ~15% of the frame it has become a wash — kill it.

### Concrete lighting recipes (drop-in for the format-C Light column: source · direction · quality · what it rims)

- **Hard key on the working hand** [Detail/Pressure]: single hard source 45° camera-side onto knuckles on the shifter — finger shadows rake the skin, sweat reads as discrete specular dots, veins as ridges, background crushed. The whitening knuckle IS the fear.
- **Backlight / rim on metal edge** [Power]: hard white or cyan source behind/above at low angle drawing one bright line down the roof gutter, mirror housing or wing edge; body in shadow, only the contour glows, against black sky.
- **Backlit smoke** [Pressure/Establish]: hard cyan or mercury-white punching *through* tire smoke from behind; volumetric shafts, the car a dark mass dissolving into glowing haze, red tail-light bleed inside the smoke for the danger accent. Front-lit smoke is dead gray nothing — always rim it from behind.
- **Brake-disc glow** [Detail/Impact]: macro on the wheel, glowing orange-red rotor through the spokes as the *only* warm element (toxic heat), rim the caliper and spokes with that glow, everything else steel blue — the one ember in a cold frame.
- **Specular on wet asphalt — the mirror** [Establish/Shift]: low bumper-height, lane stretching away, practicals (Tree, sodium lamps, headlights) reflected as long vertical smears down the wet surface as the composition's spine; pull the real lamps half out of frame, keep the mirror. Wet asphalt at night = `dramaturgy.md` §9 guilt/threat, and the cheapest way to put more cold light in frame without lifting blacks.
- **Silhouette / contre-jour** [Power/Pressure]: helmet/shoulder as pure black shape against a blown headlight or the Tree's amber bank, one thin rim defining the form plus one glint on the visor edge, no features. The brain fills the dark with something worse than any face.
- **The Christmas Tree as the scene's lamp and clock** [Pressure→Impact]: put the Tree bank in frame as the dominant practical — its glow the only key. Stage 1: two blue bulbs as cold points in the lacquer. Stage 2: three ambers blazing, amber-as-toxin spill on wet asphalt, held. Stage 3: green pops, a single green reflection streaks the hood. Match-cut the round bulb → round headlight → round tach.

**Texture and atmosphere.** Name the grain, never "clean": fine-to-medium film grain (heaviest in shadow), halation/bloom on hard practicals (soft glow ring + hard hot core), one anamorphic flare off the dominant source, slight chromatic fringe on the hottest edges (anti-sterile test in `animatic-keyframes.md` §7). One atmospheric pressure per panel (`dramaturgy.md` §9, Kurosawa) — backlit tire smoke, frozen launch grit lit on its leading edge, heat-haze warping the rimmed edge, wet asphalt as the mirror. Don't stack smoke + haze + spray in one still or it turns to mud. Keep Tony Scott's restlessness and grain; discard his warm grade.

---

## 8. Sound & rhythm

You storyboard the **sound first**; the keyframes hang off it. The general law — **loudness in the audio = panel count** — and the descending duration staircase are the density ladder in `animatic-keyframes.md` §3, sitting on the `dramaturgy.md` §12 rhythm staircase. Do not re-derive them. The race-specific rhythm rules:

- **Engine as metronome.** Tie panel *duration* to RPM: idle = ~2s panels, redline = panels collapsing 2s → 1s → 0.5s → 8fr → 4fr toward the green. The board should read as an accelerating tachometer on mute. Annotate each panel with its on-screen life.
- **Amber collapse.** The Sportsman stagger (§5) is the audible drum-roll: idle drops out on the ambers, each amber a tighter panel, the green detonates.
- **The wrinkle is the one time-expansion.** Dedicate 2–3 sequential panels to the slick folding (clean → wrinkled → gripping), marked "RAMP — hold", sound dropped (the Goodyear move) — the only place time *expands* inside the loud section.
- **Pull-to-intimate at the peak.** At the contest's tensest point, cut from a wide loud pass to an ECU of glove-on-shifter / breath-fog, shallow focus, void around it — engines stripped to breath only. The *quiet* panel goes *tight*; the loud panel goes wide.
- **Machine talks (the governing anchor).** Strip music; the `Sound` cell reads "engine + tire only" (Audi Quattro 1984).
- **Sound leads picture by 2–3fr** (J-cuts). Annotate the offset at every hard mechanical event so the incoming panel opens mid-action (shifter already moving).

Every panel inherits a `Sound` cell even though it is a still (`dramaturgy.md` §11) — prompt the *physical consequence* of the sound (deformation, particulate, smear, heat-haze, isolation-in-void), never a named sound. Fill it.

---

## 9. 30-second structure (beat map)

Five phases: **ritual → staging → launch → contest → release.** Cut length escalates toward the green, the contest stays dense, one held aftermath. ~20–26 panels. Function tags from `role-modes.md` §4. This is the structural skeleton; for a fully worked, panel-by-panel deliverable board of this exact structure (format C, ~13 rows), use `animatic-keyframes.md` §8 — do not draw a second worked board here.

| Time | Phase | Function tags | # keyframes | Panel life | Framing | Sound | Render note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0:00–0:06 | **Ritual** | Establish, Detail, Pressure | 3–4 | 1.5–2s | Macro / ECU, locked | Idle lope, metal ticks, near-silence, music off | Held low-motion inserts: slick into water box, harness latch, finger over ignition, condensation on glass. Belief is won here. |
| 0:06–0:11 | **Staging** | Pressure, Power | 3–4 | 1s → held | Symmetric MS, Tree centered, static | Idle drops to silence on ambers; Tree relay click | Pre-stage/stage bulbs; one long *held* symmetric Tree panel = the pause. Tach trembling = the only motion. |
| 0:11–0:19 | **Launch** | Impact | 6–9 | 8fr → 4fr (burst) | Low bumper-POV, side-rig, ECU tach | BANG: tire chirp + roar, J-cut 2–3fr ahead | Hip-hop burst cluster: bumper smear, side wheelspin, tach flare, clutch hand, lane-stripe strobe. Asphalt in frame. One speed-ramp on the wrinkle. |
| 0:19–0:27 | **Contest** | Power, Shift, Reaction | 6–8 | 0.5–1s | Mirror two-shot, joust, parallel pass | Layered roar; **one pull-to-intimate / in-the-head panel** | Mirrored compositions, joust, parallel pass, one medium-wide proving ground-speed. Alternate fragment-cluster ↔ one quiet detail panel. |
| 0:27–0:30 | **Release / Aftermath** | Impact, Aftermath, Exit | 2–3 | 0.5s, then 2s hold | Wide-to-detail, smoke in beam | Hard cut to silence / one tick | Finish marker + microscopic edge, OR skip the result → engine drop, smoke through headlight beam, car nosing into dark. End on consequence, not explanation. |

Allocation: plot the board as a descending duration staircase, broken only by the one pre-launch held panel (the single most-held still, most negative space) and the one post-finish hold. The launch is *never* one hero frame — fan it into the 6–9-panel micro-burst. No two bang-clusters touch; every burst is separated by a held quiet panel.

---

## 10. Anti-fake guard

The race-specific list of panels that kill credibility — do not draw. (The general per-panel earns-its-place checklist is `animatic-keyframes.md` §9; run that on every panel as well.)

- [ ] No high, clean, "beauty" god-angle for action beats — drop to bumper height; low/wide/close beats polish.
- [ ] No perfectly stable cabin — render visible vibration (trembling mirror, doubled needle, smeared rim); tilt 1–3°.
- [ ] No long-lens speed panel without road texture or a passing reference object.
- [ ] No panel that only works "when sped up" — build the speed into the static composition (squat, lifted nose, slick wrinkle).
- [ ] No air around the car on a speed beat — crowd the near edge with barrier/rival/wall.
- [ ] No sharp wheel rim on a moving car — smear the spokes into a disc.
- [ ] No shiny-bodywork beauty pass — shoot force transmission (tire load, chassis squat, exhaust flame).
- [ ] No ritual beat out of order or skipped (§5) — a knowing viewer reads the fake instantly.
- [ ] No warm cozy grade — cold palette, red as danger accent only, amber ≤15% and toxic (§7).
- [ ] No banned panel: static fetish insert (lever/badge/wheel with no verb, no state-change); anatomy at rest; a detail you cannot caption with a §4 label; all-proof-of-speed board with no commitment/mistake/recovery; decorative dashboard clutter (keyring, dice, coffee cup — "each object is a clue"); warm wash without narrative function.

Before sending the board, run `animatic-keyframes.md` §9 (per-panel master checklist), `dramaturgy.md` §15 and `universal-rules.md` §13 over it. The most-violated step is the three-detail check — do not skip it.

---

*Author: Serge Shima ([t.me/aimastersme](https://t.me/aimastersme) · [sergeshima.com](https://sergeshima.com) · [aimasters.me](https://aimasters.me)) · License: CC BY 4.0 — attribution required · Source: [smixs/visual-skills](https://github.com/smixs/visual-skills)*