Updated 5 November 2026 · Markdown

Looks

Every film has one of three looks, chosen before it is made: code-drawn, painted or collage. The person picks the look; everything inside it is Claude's choice, and the idea can steer it in words: the style, the colours, the voice and the music.

Before anything else, Claude decides from the idea who the film is for and its mood, and holds the whole film to one bar: professionally made for that audience. It does not assume children unless the idea says so, so a business documentary or a hospital explainer does not come out looking like a cartoon, while a bedtime story still looks like one. KitCut's instructions to Claude set that bar and name what exists; they prescribe no style.

Code-drawn

• Drawn in code: Claude draws everything with KitCut's sketch engine, a pen and a set of ready-made props, and animates it frame by frame.
• Two drawing styles:
  • Crayon (the default): hand-drawn lines that "boil" slightly from frame to frame, off-register fills, paper texture and grain.
  • Clean: crisp editorial line art, exact flat fills, a flat ground.
• Ten grounds: paper, white, kraft, sky, mint, butter, blush, night, chalkboard and blueprint. A film can change ground as it goes.
• Pictures the person attached can be shown in the film, placed like a pinned print.

Painted

• The scenes are painted by an image model (Muse, by Meta) from Claude's descriptions, in the film's shape: 1920x1280 for a wide film, 1280x1920 for a 9:16 Short, so a Short's paintings fill the phone screen. A project with a style keeps its painter and its pictures in every frame (Characters and projects).
• Claude animates the paintings: camera moves across them, cross-fades on spoken words, and words and hand-drawn marks on top.
• Painting styles Claude chooses from include paper-cut illustration (painted as one scene; for separate cut-outs that move, choose Collage), flat vector poster, 1950s travel poster, claymation, ukiyo-e, ink wash, charcoal, gouache, risograph, pixel art, soft 3D, cinematic photoreal and watercolour.
• How many paintings a film gets depends on its length, repaints included:

• No lettering in paintings. Words on screen are drawn over them instead.
• The painter is given pictures as well as words. Claude paints a character once, then paints every later scene they are in from that painting, so they keep their face, hair and clothes. A project's painted characters (Characters and projects) and its style's pictures (Style) go in the same way, whichever painter the style uses.
• GPT Image paints a draft first, unless the episode asks for more: its episode box offers Standard or High pictures from the start, for more credits. A draft can be painted again at either later, the same pictures, as the film's next version (Sharper pictures). Muse's paintings have no quality to choose and no sharper version.
• Consistency: a character painted from their picture stays close from one painting to the next, but small details (a pattern, a button) can still change.

Collage

• Pictures cut out of paper: an image model (GPT Image, by OpenAI) paints each picture as a single object or figure on a transparent background, from Claude's description, and it gets a white scissor-cut border.
• Claude builds pages round them in code: sheets of paper with torn edges, display type, tape labels, rubber stamps, marker arrows, halftone dots and letters cut from different pages, each arriving on the word that names it.
• Moves like stop-motion: every piece shakes a pixel or so on a clock of about twelve steps a second, the way paper moves under a camera.
• The medium of the pictures is Claude's choice, or the idea's: old engravings, photographs, woodcuts, gouache, clay models.
• Print typefaces: Abril Fatface, Playfair Display, Old Standard TT, Oswald, Anton, Courier Prime, IBM Plex Mono and a blackletter. A line in Cyrillic is set in a face that has the letters.
• How many cut-outs a film gets is in the table above, repaints included.
• The cut-outs come as drafts unless the film asks for more: painted quickly, good to watch and a little soft up close. Pictures beside the frame picks Standard or High from the start, for more credits (Look, length and frame), and Sharper pictures paints a finished film's cut-outs again, each from its draft, as its next version (Sharper pictures).
• No lettering in the pictures. Words go on the pages in code.

Text on screen

• Optional in every look, and in the narration's language.
• Three fonts in the code-drawn and painted looks: Caveat (handwriting, the default), Balsamiq Sans and Patrick Hand. The collage look adds its print faces (above). A project's style or brand can set fonts of its own (Characters and projects).
  • Caveat and Balsamiq Sans cover Latin and Cyrillic alphabets; Patrick Hand covers Latin only.
  • On-screen words in other scripts (such as Chinese, Arabic or Hindi) are not supported. Narration in those languages still works.

Steering the look

Say it in the idea, in plain words, or give a project the pictures to follow on its Style tab (Characters and projects):

• "clean line art on a blueprint ground"
• "painted like a 1950s travel poster, warm evening light"
• "a collage of old engravings on torn newspaper"
• "chalkboard, with a playful tone"
• "keep the same fox, look and music as last time" (see Characters and projects)

Claude follows what is asked when it can, and chooses the rest.