Wink Pings

A 65-second animation with 27 million views, broken down into 25 open-source Skills

Dumble broke down a bronze-jar short: 2D characters, 3D lighting, a real story, one narrator's voice, plus 25 open-source repos and a reproducible review workflow. The tools are free; the scripts and judgment are not.

A 65-second cartoon about Zhang Heng's seismoscope in 132 AD. A bronze vessel, eight dragons, eight frogs. Uploaded to YouTube on October 19; 27 million views eight days later. The same channel, Ricks Clips, has other shorts in the same format with 13 million, 10 million, and 10 million views.

Dumble broke the video down at one frame per second, wrote a full course, and listed 25 open-source Skills. He first states: he does not know Ricks Clips' exact pipeline; what he shares is a reproducible open-source path.

The breakdown table is clear:

  • Format: 1080x1920, 30 fps, 65 seconds.
  • Story: one real historical story, told entirely by one narrator's voice.
  • Characters: flat 2D, round heads, dot eyes, thick outlines, stick limbs.
  • Scenes: fully 3D, with lighting, materials, and depth of field.
  • Blend: 2D characters standing in 3D scenes, 2.5D.
  • Editing: a new shot roughly every 2 seconds.
  • Camera: slow push-ins and movement, not random drift.
  • Captions: 1 to 2 words at a time, bold white, lower-center.
  • Hook: the title asks why, how, or what actually happened.

The story is Zhang Heng's seismoscope: a ball falls into a frog's mouth to show the direction. The viewer gets one fact they can retell. The animation is the delivery mechanism.

This format doesn't feel like AI slop, and the reason isn't mysterious. The characters are intentionally simple, avoiding the uncanny valley; the scenes are intentionally rich, with warm light, realistic materials, and depth of field; the camera follows the script's ideas; there is one voice; and the real story is checkable.

In Dumble's main thread, the 25 Skills fall into five categories, totaling 860K+ GitHub stars. All are free and open source. Every card in the video is a 3D scene he built and rendered himself in Blender.

DESIGN

  • anthropic skills: official repo, frontend + canvas design, 190K★.
  • impeccable: /polish /bolder /critique, specifically targets AI slop, 107K★.
  • open-design: open-source AI design workspace, 107K★.
  • hallmark: rejects designs that look AI-made, 51K★.
  • huashu design: one line of input, finished design output, 29K★.

VIDEO

3D

MOTION

BRAND

The reproduction path in the course isn't complicated; the hard part is review.

  1. Use ffmpeg to extract frames; treat the reference video as format analysis, not content to copy. Save REFERENCE.md, marking MEASURED, ESTIMATED, DECISION.
  2. Install Blender MCP, motion-design-skill, Remotion skills, Whisper. Claude Code reads CLAUDE.md and hard-codes format, editing, camera, and banned items.
  3. First find 5 real stories, each with 2 openable sources. The selected scripts are 150 to 170 words, the first sentence is the hook, there's a turn around 40 seconds, and the last sentence pays it off.
  4. Break the script into shots. Each shot is 1.5 to 3 seconds; specify scene, camera position, characters, props, sound. For 65 seconds, use 3 to 5 reusable scenes, not 30.
  5. Blender in three passes: BLOCK, LIGHT, DRESS. One motivated key light, warm practical sources, Poly Haven HDRI fill. Hero props must be 3D and pass a six-angle turntable first.
  6. Break characters into SVG parts, import them into Blender as planes, use Emit or Shadeless materials, and add contact shadows under their feet. Swap expressions on the beat; no meaningless bouncing. For each shot, first write the performance line: thought, anticipation, action, hold.
  7. Record the narration yourself. Whisper gives word-level timestamps; Remotion makes 1-to-2-word captions. Sound effects appear only on physical events—ball falls, frog sounds, eyes open—and are written into the same frame numbers.
  8. Review the film on a contact sheet, one frame per second, then look at it at phone size. Have Opus act as the harshest animation director, list timestamped problems, fix only the worst 3, and re-render only those seconds. Fixes have four fields: where, problem, change, keep.
  9. Before export, use ffprobe to check 1080x1920, 30/1, and duration. Once the process works, package it as SKILL.md, and the next episode is one command.

Platform bottom lines are also written into the course: learn the grammar, don't copy the content. Do not 1:1 copy characters, design, or scripts. For real stories, every fact goes into sources.md. Content that could be mistaken for real footage must be labeled AI. YouTube is unfriendly to mass-produced repetitive content.

A year ago, this kind of short required modeling, animation, lighting, and editing. Now it takes a real story, your voice, Blender, Opus 5.5, and the patience to review your own frames. The tools are free. Story, taste, and honesty still come from the human. Don't plan the channel first; make one complete episode first.

Related links: Dumble's original tweet https://x.com/Y0urDumble/status/2120197632500887856 ; course https://x.com/i/article/2115149367057256448 .

发布时间: 2026-11-11 07:27