One-Line Drawing Film

# One-line Drawing — Style Prompt

> A single ink line that never leaves the paper. Everything on screen is that one line being drawn; scenes don't cut, they morph.
> References (grammar only): Osvaldo Cavandoli's *La Linea* (1971) — one line is both the world and the character, and transformations of the line are the jokes and the transitions; Gjon Mili's 1949 photographs of Picasso drawing with light — the confidence and speed of a single gesture; Norman McLaren's *Begone Dull Care* and *Boogie-Doodle* — lines drawn *to* the music. Do not copy La Linea's character, its gibberish voice, or any specific continuous-line illustration.

[…]

## 1. Essence, and what it is not

- **One continuous line** on warm white paper. The pen never lifts: in code the whole film can literally be one point array, from the first touch of the nib to the last frame.
- **Everything is a line**: characters, places, objects, even time. No fills, no shading, no second line weight, no background art.
- **We watch the line being drawn**: the camera follows the nib with a little lag and anticipation.
- Besides ink there is only the paper and a soft **shadow of the pen** (the real world above the paper). One accent colour at most, used once.

Not a whiteboard explainer (no hand, no marker, no erasing, no text-heavy boards), not ink wash (no tones, no brush bloom as a look), not a line-art animation with cuts and many strokes.

[…]

## 5. Motion quality

- **Everything on ones** (24 fps): the appeal is the continuous act of drawing; stepping breaks it.
- **Timing = chapter windows + curvature**: within a window, time per point is weighted by `1 + K·turn` (sharp turns get more time, smoothed so speed never jumps). Pin musical beats with marks: by arc-length fraction or by position ("the second time the pen passes here"). A stop is two marks at the same place.
- Corners (speed minima at high turn) can be exported to the soundtrack as candidate note onsets.
- Speeds: ~300–700 units/s for travelling lines, ~50–150 for small details. The most important stroke is usually the slowest.
- **Retracing** over an existing line is legal and invisible (it only thickens slightly).

From Lemomo's repo, under the MIT license.

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