3.4 KiB
Scene prompt - Intro: the establishing shot (masthead backdrop)
The one image the site opens on, behind the title. It is NOT a course scene: nothing gets sliced here, so the usual "generous void gaps between parts" rule relaxes. What it must do is read at a GLANCE as "a machine world seen from a distance", sit far enough back that white title text stays legible over it, and use the same materials as every course so the page feels like one object.
Composition rule for this one: the CENTRE-TOP THIRD stays dark and quiet (the headline lives there). Weight the interest low and wide. Generate ~4 at 16:9, curate with the reject checklist, save to disk for pickup.
Dark technical exploded-view illustration in a cinematic sci-fi engineering style. Solid near-black deep void background, hex #070b14 - completely clean: no stars, no grid, no texture, no particles behind or around the objects. Matte dark metal-and-glass surfaces with glowing neon edge lighting: primary cyan #3fbaf5, secondary magenta #e879f9 accents, cool white rim highlights. Camera: fixed 30-degree isometric angle, even studio lighting, no vignette, no lens flare, no depth-of-field blur. ABSOLUTELY NO text, no letters, no numbers, no words, no code, no glyphs, no labels, no arrows, no callout lines, no UI elements anywhere in the image - every surface marking must be an abstract geometric pattern only.
The subject: a wide establishing view of an entire machine world, seen from far away and slightly above, as if the whole facility has been taken apart and left floating in the dark. Across the lower two thirds of the frame, a loose archipelago of small dark machine forms drifts in the void with generous space between them: flat stacked slabs, a few chamfered cubes, a ringed cylinder, a faceted geodesic sphere lit from within, an open doorframe arch, a low armoured vault box, and several thin plates tumbling at angles. Each object is small in frame - none dominant - each picked out by fine cyan edge light with occasional magenta accents, and each fully surrounded by void. Scale falls away toward the horizon so the nearer objects are larger and the far ones are tiny points of cyan light. The upper third of the frame is almost entirely empty void, with only one or two faint distant shapes near the edges.
Build-side notes (not part of the prompt)
- Usage: masthead backdrop for the intro. NOT sliced - it renders as one image behind the title block, scroll-parallaxed and faded out as the index arrives (motion class = parallax, so it is disabled entirely under reduced-motion per house-motion-system).
- Curation gate specific to this image: hold a light-grey rectangle over the centre-top third; if the title would be hard to read there, reject the candidate. Busy-centre compositions fail here even if they look great alone.
- Family check: the objects should be recognisable relatives of the course heroes (slabs = Course I, cubes = Course II workers, sphere = Course V core, arch = Routes, vault = the secret store). A viewer who scrolls the whole site should feel they have just toured this picture.
- Processing: WebP, 1600px wide, target <=180KB (it is a backdrop, quality can sit lower than a scene hero since text overlays it and it is partly faded in use).
- Watermark: Gemini sparkle bottom-right - strip with ffmpeg delogo before use.
- If it never gets generated: the intro entrance already ships and works without art; this is additive, not a blocker.