KinoGlyph

KinoGlyph is a Claude Code skill that turns a video into looping ASCII art driven by optical flow — the per-pixel motion field between frames — rather than the source brightness. The result reads as choreography: each character represents the direction and intensity of motion at that location, abstracted from the original footage but preserving the way it moved.

The pipeline runs in five stages — frame sampling, optical flow computation, anchor selection, sequencing, and ASCII rendering — and produces a seamlessly looping MP4 or GIF. Anchors are local maxima in the smoothed motion timeline; the script cross-fades between them with a smoothstep weight so the loop seams back into itself without any hard cuts.

It’s not a still-image ASCII filter, and it’s not an exact-pixel replication. The point is the abstraction — the output captures the motion of the source the way a contact print captures the gesture of a hand.

The gallery below shows different rendering modes against the same source: hybrid (brightness backbone with motion-driven color and density), motion (pure motion telemetry, no source content visible), and brightness (classic ASCII-art rendering of brightness with motion modulating intensity).