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Your Level 1 music slideshow cut real photos to the beat — there was real art to work with. This chapter is for the opposite case: a hero character, a painterly scene, sculptural objects that don’t exist as a photo or a footage capture yet. Code-drawn HTML/CSS/SVG excels where the medium is native: UI mockups, typography, geometric shapes, charts, pixel art, and 3D via Three.js. For illustration-led hero art — characters, painterly scenes, sculptural objects — hand-drawn SVG tops out at clipart quality no matter how well you prompt. The fix is a hybrid:
Generate the hero artwork as an image (via the media-use skill’s image generation), then animate it with code. Anything that must move independently — eyelids, light beams, drawing lines — stays a code layer on top of the static art.
Three rules that make this work:
  1. Generate on a solid contrasting background (magenta works) so the subject keys out cleanly. A light subject on a light background gets silently eaten.
  2. Key flat vector-style art with a chroma key (ffmpeg colorkey), not AI background removal — remove-background’s matting model is tuned for photographic and human subjects and reads flat art unreliably, sometimes keeping the background instead of the subject. Reserve remove-background for photographs.
  3. Put a restraint clause in the generation prompt (“minimal, lots of negative space”) — image models fill the frame by default, and a busy generated texture reads as cheap as bad vector art.

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The difference, side by side

The same brief — four people arm in arm, warm gradient sweaters, flat-illustration style — built both ways. Same animation beats, same craft layer (lighting, atmosphere, grade); the only variable is where the figures came from. Hand-drawn SVG figures — clean, but the proportions and gesture read as clipart. Generated illustration animated as layers — real anatomy and editorial shading; the animated line still passes behind the figures because the artwork was keyed to transparency.
Capstone thread — the Level 7 film’s Surface region rides on generated artwork: a palette-neutral mural duotoned live by CSS from the composition’s two variables, so even the raster re-skins on a --variables render (cut from the film, below).
This is the clause in the full capstone prompt that buys the piece — prompt language you can lift for your own video:
[…] over a generated-artwork backdrop — a flat abstract mural evoking motion trails, generated palette-neutral (grayscale) and duotoned live by CSS from the two variables so it re-skins with everything else. The mural is a full-frame, screen-fixed backdrop: it never moves on screen — the widening iris circle alone reveals it already in place at full frame […] and it exits by fading out.
That clause, rendered — the region cut from the finished film. Next: VFX and liquid glass — device mockups, frosted glass, and cinematic effects for when the layer on top needs its own spectacle.