faceless-shorts

Repeatable pipeline for faceless short-form video (YouTube Shorts / Reels / TikTok) on DevOps, observability, and system design topics. Spanish first. No on-camera presence.

Videos are animated with Remotion — React that renders to video, so every short is version-controlled, diffable, and reproducible. Remotion produces the silent visual; voiceover and subtitles are added afterwards in DaVinci Resolve.

Backlog of topics lives in the Obsidian vault: Resources/youtube-shorts-backlog.md.

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Toolchain

Job	Tool	Install
Animation / render	Remotion (React)	task install
Task runner	Task	brew install go-task
Voiceover	Piper (fast) or XTTS-v2	local
Subtitles	WhisperX	local
Edit / mux / export	DaVinci Resolve (free)	cask

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Repo layout

shorts/
├── Taskfile.yml
├── src/
│   ├── Root.tsx            # composition registry — one entry per video
│   ├── theme.ts            # brand palette + fonts
│   ├── lib/anim.ts         # clamp / lerp / ease / progress
│   ├── scenes/             # the reusable library
│   │   ├── Title.tsx
│   │   ├── Caption.tsx
│   │   ├── Reveal.tsx
│   │   ├── chain/          # request hopping through N parties
│   │   └── code/           # syntax-highlighted config with animated diffs
│   └── videos/
│       └── <name>/
│           ├── script.md   # the script, written by hand
│           └── Video.tsx   # the animation
└── out/                    # renders (gitignored)

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Per-short workflow

1. Pick a topic from the backlog in the vault.
2. Create the folder — src/videos/<name>/ — and write script.md: the idea, the beats in order, and any notes on emphasis. This is a script for a human, not a config file; nothing renders from it.
3. Build the animation in Video.tsx, composing scenes from src/scenes/. Register it in src/Root.tsx with the composition id matching the folder name.
4. Preview with task studio — hot-reloads while you edit.
5. Render — task render VIDEO=<name> → out/<name>.mp4.
6. Finish in DaVinci — voiceover, burned-in subtitles from WhisperX, export vertical 1080×1920. Publish, cross-post, mark 🟩 in the backlog.

task list                    # available videos
task render VIDEO=dns        # one video  → out/dns.mp4
task all                     # every video
task studio                  # live preview
task typecheck               # tsc --noEmit
task clean                   # remove renders

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Scene library

Everything reusable lives in src/scenes/ so a second short on a similar shape costs a script and a Video.tsx, not a new set of components.

• Title — kicker + subject, pinned top. mono for literals (domains, commands).
• Caption — narration strip. Shared so pacing reads consistently across videos.
• Reveal — the payoff beat: an answer, large, after the scene dims back.
• chain/Chain — a request travelling through parties that answer or refer onward. Fits DNS, TLS handshakes, OAuth redirects, ingress paths, mTLS. Takes nodes and hops; hops declare a duration and start frames are derived.
• code/CodeBlock — syntax-highlighted config (Prism) with a character-level animated diff and line focus. Handles changes within lines; inserting or deleting a line would misalign the rows below it.

Convention: anything reusable across shorts goes in src/scenes/. Keep only topic-specific data and composition in videos/<name>/Video.tsx.

Resist reaching for Chain just because it exists — roughly a third of the backlog suits it. The rest wants shapes that aren't built yet, largely symptom → cause → fix, which is the highest-retention format.

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Conventions

• 1080×1920, 30fps. Set once in src/Root.tsx.
• Timing is data. Scenes take durations, not hardcoded start frames. Derive starts from durations so retiming one beat doesn't cascade.
• Keep animation math pure. scenes/chain/timing.ts is a function of (frame, hops) with no React imports — that is what makes it testable and debuggable at a specific frame.
• Tween state changes, don't switch them. Discrete per-frame states read as hard cuts on screen.
• No audio in Remotion. Voiceover and subtitles belong to the DaVinci step.

Cadence

Start 2/week for 4 weeks, batch-rendered in one session. Track retention + saves; double down on the best-performing format. Weekly check in vault Reviews/.