Orb Swarm

Four glass orbs burst out of the first line. They split into eight, then sixteen, and drift out while the sentence builds word by word underneath them. Then the sixteen wind into a clockwise vortex, collapse into a knot, pay out as a chain, and the chain reaches round the closing card and closes on itself — before shrinking away from its tail, one bead a beat.

Everything is on the reference's clock

The scene was measured off a 24fps recording, beat by beat, so every table in the file is indexed in beats (1/24 s) and read at fractional beats with the same curve. A 30fps composition samples between them and gets the motion the recording could not show, rather than a pulldown judder it did.

Each phase is the smallest description that reproduces the recording:

• Burst and splits. Every orb moves on a straight line from where it is born. The eight share one ease; so do the sixteen. The first four each have their own, and they are stored as such rather than averaged into a curve none of them follows.
• The vortex. The sixteen turn about one point, faster every beat, and shrink toward it — and the orbs themselves shrink with it, a fifth as fast, so they read as falling away as well as in.
• The chain. From the collapse onward there is no rule the recording follows closely enough to be worth a formula, so it is the measurement itself: sixteen beads a beat, position and size. While the chain is still a stack its tail lies on top; once it opens out, the head does.

The orbs are drawn, not styled

Each orb carries a band texture that scrolls down its face once every fourteen beats, and the bands bow toward the rim like latitude lines on a sphere. A CSS gradient cannot bend, so the orbs are shaded per pixel into a canvas with the same function the reference was fitted with — the band table, the bow, and a two-pixel soft edge with a faint dark ring inside it that is what reads as glass rather than paint.

The type is drawn into the same canvas, four times finer than the frame and then reduced. That is not decoration: a browser snaps every glyph's baseline to a whole pixel, on the page and in a canvas alike, and the reference's baselines sit between them.

The script

script is six cards separated by |. The first, second and last arrive whole; the three in the middle reveal word by word on the reference's beats, and the newest word wears a few indigos and a violet, letter by letter, until the next one lands and it turns to ink. The first card leaves on a wave — its letters thrown alternately up and down as the line swells — and the second arrives on one, rising into place from below.

<OrbSwarm script="one command | what if | every launch | you shipped | got a video | in seconds" />

Cards can hold as many words as you like; a card with more words than the reference's spreads its colours across them.

Notes

softness is how soft the type is, in card pixels of blur. The reference is a screen capture and its type is this soft; 0 is crisp. The orbs keep their own soft edge either way — it is part of how they are shaded.

background and ink are the page and the settled type. orbColor turns the whole glass — its bands, its rim, and the tints the newest words wear — to one hue in OKLCH, keeping every lightness as measured, so any colour still reads as the same glass. It defaults to snapcn's blue; #9f77f8 is the reference's own violet.

The card is the reference's own 714 × 392 pixels, scaled to cover whatever composition it is placed in, so a 16:9 frame crops a sliver off the top and bottom rather than letterboxing.

Installation

$ pnpm dlx shadcn@latest add @snapcn/orb-swarm

Component code

The exact file shadcn add copies into your project.

Usage

// src/Root.tsx
import { Composition } from "remotion";
import { OrbSwarm } from "@/components/snap-cn/orb-swarm";

const Scene = () => (
  <OrbSwarm script="one command | what if | every launch | you shipped | got a video | in seconds" />
);

export const RemotionRoot = () => (
  <Composition
    id="OrbSwarm"
    component={Scene}
    durationInFrames={160}
    fps={30}
    width={1280}
    height={720}
  />
);

Props

Frequently asked questions

How do I add Orb Swarm to a Remotion project?

Run npx shadcn@latest add @snapcn/orb-swarm. The source is copied into components/snap-cn/ (or wherever your components.json points) with anything it depends on, and you own the code from then on — there is no runtime package to keep installed.

What is Orb Swarm?

Orb Swarm is a Remotion kinetic typography with orbs for React. A sentence told one beat at a time while glass orbs burst out of it, split into eight and sixteen, wind into a vortex, pay out as a chain and loop around the last words.

What do I need before using Orb Swarm?

An existing Remotion project (npx create-video@latest) with a components.json. shadcn init does not recognise Remotion, so the installation guide has you write that file by hand — it takes two minutes. The component is MIT licensed and free.