# Tone & Style Reference Guide

## Tone Profiles

### 🎬 Cinematic
**Feeling**: Epic, sweeping, emotionally resonant
**Language**: Vivid action verbs, sensory details, dramatic pauses
**Narration style**: Documentary-style voiceover. Authoritative yet intimate.
**Image style**: Anamorphic lens distortion, golden hour light, wide establishing shots, movie still aesthetic
**Voice**: Deep, measured, male or female (e.g., David Attenborough meets Hans Zimmer)
**Color palette**: Golden ambers, deep blues, rich shadows, high contrast
**Example**: "The city breathes. Seven million souls, each carrying their own private universe, converge at rush hour — strangers sharing the same moment, forever apart."

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### ⚡ Dramatic
**Feeling**: Intense, high-stakes, emotionally raw
**Language**: Short punchy sentences. Fragments. Urgency.
**Narration style**: Present-tense crisis. Every word matters.
**Image style**: Chiaroscuro lighting, heavy shadows, dark oil painting, single light source
**Voice**: Intense, slightly faster pace, lower pitch
**Color palette**: Blood red, ash grey, deep black, stark white
**Example**: "The verdict falls. One word. Guilty. The courtroom erupts. History pivots on a single moment — and nothing will ever be the same."

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### 🌈 Whimsical (For Kids)
**Feeling**: Magical, warm, curious, safe
**Language**: Simple words, friendly analogies, occasional rhyme
**Narration style**: Warm storyteller voice. Inclusive "we" and "you".
**Image style**: Bright digital illustration, pastel colors, cute characters, soft edges
**Voice**: Warm, expressive, slightly higher pitch, playful
**Color palette**: Pastel rainbow, sunshine yellow, mint green, sky blue
**Example**: "Deep inside every single leaf, something magical is happening right now! Tiny green helpers called chloroplasts are catching sunbeams and turning them into sugar — it's like cooking with sunshine!"

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### 📚 Educational
**Feeling**: Clear, engaging, trustworthy, empowering
**Language**: Accessible explanations, concrete examples, analogies
**Narration style**: Confident teacher who loves their subject
**Image style**: Clean diagram aesthetic, bright flat design, clear composition
**Voice**: Clear, articulate, warm authority
**Color palette**: Bright blue, white, yellow accents, clean backgrounds
**Example**: "Photosynthesis is the original solar panel — plants figured out how to capture energy from light billions of years before we did. Here's how they do it."

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### 🌙 Poetic
**Feeling**: Contemplative, beautiful, mysterious, moving
**Language**: Rich imagery, metaphor, rhythm, white space
**Narration style**: Lyrical, meditative, unhurried
**Image style**: Impressionist or watercolor, soft dreamlike colors, impressionist strokes
**Voice**: Soft, slow, reverent, like reading poetry aloud
**Color palette**: Deep navy, soft gold, misty silver, rose
**Example**: "A star dies the way a word dies — slowly, at first, then all at once. What remains is not nothing. It is everything it ever was, scattered across the cosmos like a story retold."

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## Audience Adjustments

### General
Standard adult vocabulary. Assume curiosity, not expertise.

### Children (audience: children)
- Max sentence length: 12 words
- No passive voice
- Use "you", "we", "let's"
- Analogies to everyday things: toys, food, animals
- Image prompts: friendly faces, bright colors, no scary elements

### Professional
- Can use domain terminology (briefly explained)
- More analytical tone
- Data-driven language acceptable
- Image prompts: professional, clean, sophisticated