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What a motion graphic is

A motion graphic is a short, design-led piece where motion is the message — kinetic typography, a stat count-up, a chart hit, a logo sting, a lower-third or social overlay, an animated map, tweet, or headline. It’s usually under 10 seconds (up to ~30s), has no narration and no live-action subject, and renders to an MP4 or a transparent overlay. Route with /motion-graphics. The workflow is autonomous by design — at most one clarifying question, then straight through to render. Reach for a different workflow when the piece grows past what “motion is the message” covers:
If the piece is…Route instead
Longer, multi-scene, or narrated/general-video
A narrated video of a website/website-to-video
A topic explainer with a voice-over/faceless-explainer
A product promo / launch/product-launch-video
Captions on existing footage/embedded-captions

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Base prompt

The canonical shape: routed, spec’d, beat-timestamped, copy quoted, technique pinned, gaps closed.
/motion-graphics Make an 8-second 1920x1080 video. Beat 1 (0-4s): dark macOS terminal types “npx skills add heygen-com/hyperframes” character by character, then hold on the blinking cursor. Beat 2 (4-5s): the terminal shatters into fragments. Beat 3 (5-8s): bold white kinetic text on black slams in word by word, snappy: “YOU JUST MADE THIS / WITH HYPERFRAMES.” Adapt the code-typing and vfx-shatter registry blocks; hand-author the kinetic text. No narration, no image or media files.
Rendered from the prompt above, unedited.

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Variants

Each reuses a registry block, so the agent composes rather than hand-building from scratch.
/motion-graphics 6-second 1920x1080 video, dark navy background. Beat 1 (0-1s): label “ARR” fades up small, top-center. Beat 2 (1-4s): a giant number counts up to $4.2M with an odometer roll, easing out as it lands. Beat 3 (4-6s): “+312% YoY” stamps in below in green, then everything settles into a gentle ambient idle (subtle breathing scale, slow particle drift). Use the apple-money-count registry block as base. No narration.
/motion-graphics 5-second 1920x1080 logo sting. Beat 1 (0-2s): the word “ACME” assembles from scattered particles. Beat 2 (2-3s): full-frame swirl-vortex shader transition. Beat 3 (3-5s): logo lockup + tagline “Ship faster.” settles on white, then holds with a subtle ambient idle (slow breathing scale). Use code-particle-assemble for the assembly.
/motion-graphics 7-second 1080x1350 vertical video. A real tweet card (handle @hyperframes, text “we render video from HTML now. no timeline UI. just code.”) slides up over a soft animated gradient, likes counter ticks 0→1.2K, then the card tilts in 3D and a highlight sweeps the second sentence. Settle into a gentle ambient idle on the card at the end. Use the x-post and vfx-liquid-background registry blocks. No narration, no image or media files.
/motion-graphics 8-second 1920x1080 video. Dark world map, a glowing arc animates from San Francisco to Tokyo over 3s, destination pin drops with a pulse, then camera zooms into Tokyo and the label “LATENCY: 89ms” types on. Use the nyc-paris-flight registry block as the base pattern, restyle to teal on charcoal. No narration.

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The knobs that matter

Duration. Keep it short — motion graphics live under 10 seconds, up to ~30. A 2-second idea stretched to 8 feels slow no matter how it’s animated; if the piece genuinely needs multiple scenes or a longer runtime, it’s a /general-video, not a motion graphic. MP4 vs transparent overlay. The default output is an MP4. Ask for a transparent overlay — a lower-third, a callout, a bug meant to composite over other footage — and the render targets webm or mov with alpha. Transparency only makes sense when part of the frame is meant to be empty. A full-frame design (its own background, edge-to-edge composition) has nothing to be transparent, so asking for a transparent WebM there produces either an opaque file or a broken-looking one. Say “transparent overlay, alpha channel” only for pieces designed to sit on top of something else. Registry blocks vs freeform. Naming a block (apple-money-count, x-post, data-chart, code-typing, us-map / world-map) makes the agent compose reuse-first: install the block, customize in place, hand-author only the gaps. Omit the block and it hand-builds from your description — fine for one-off looks, more drift on the details you didn’t pin. Name blocks exactly as they appear in the catalog. Easing and motion feel. The words you use for how motion feels — “snappy”, “bouncy”, “settles with overshoot” — map to specific eases. Spend them; they’re cheap precision. See Vocabulary for the adjective-to-ease table and Premium motion for the grammar that keeps a piece from reading cheap (nothing fully stops, action overlaps, the camera acts).

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Failure modes

Transparent output on a full-frame design. Alpha is for overlay elements, not for pieces that fill the frame. A design with its own background has no transparent region to export.
  • ❌ an 8s full-screen stat count-up on dark navy — export as a transparent WebM
  • ✅ an 8s stat count-up on dark navy, MP4 — or, for a bug to composite over footage: just the count-up chip, no background, transparent overlay (webm)
Narration on a motion-is-the-message piece. Motion graphics are unnarrated by definition — the visual carries it. A voice-over means a different workflow.
  • ❌ /motion-graphics a 10s logo sting with a voice-over reading the tagline
  • ✅ /motion-graphics a 10s logo sting, no narration — for a spoken track, use /faceless-explainer or /general-video.
Stretching a short idea long. Runtime is a knob, and past ~30s a single motion beat runs out of things to do.
  • ❌ a 45-second kinetic-type piece of one headline
  • ✅ an 8-second kinetic-type piece of one headline — or promote it to a multi-scene /general-video.
For the six-part skeleton and the per-beat content formula these prompts share, see Prompt anatomy; for the full set of run-verified examples, Verified examples. Unsure whether your ask is a motion graphic at all? Start at the router in /hyperframes.