ONE MORE SCROLL: every everyday object in Colombo is a portal… and the loop never ends.

Primary effect: Bring your own effect – Portal Zoom (custom GLSL transition, agent-built, no rotoscoping, no tracking)

THE IDEA "POV: you can't stop scrolling." Kavin is scrolling on a bench at Galle Face at sunset. We dive into his phone's camera lens and fall through a whole Colombo day. Every scene ends by diving through an everyday opening: the hole of an ulundu vadai in Pettah, a tuk-tuk's round mirror, Tharu's gold bangle held up like a telescope, a freshly cut king coconut, the full moon over Mount Lavinia. Then the twist: Tharu, alone at a bus stop at midnight, is watching Kavin on HER phone. We dive into her screen, land back on the bench, he looks at us and smiles: "…one more scroll?" And it loops forever.

I checked the #invideocontrachallenge feed first. Portal entries exist, but they're mostly one-off world swaps, and almost nothing has a regional identity. So: a full infinite loop, Sri Lankan objects as the portals, and a story twist that makes the loop mean something.

THE EFFECT: PORTAL ZOOM One agent-written shader transition, used on all 8 cuts. Instead of tracking the object, every cut gets its own portal centre and size as controls.

The outgoing shot dollies into the opening with a radial zoom blur

The next shot appears INSIDE the opening (a circle or rounded-rectangle matte), already moving

The opening and the new shot grow together until the new shot fills the frame, with a warm rim light on the edge It feels like one continuous camera move through 8 worlds.

HOW I WORKED (Claude + the invideo MCP) I directed the whole build from Claude, connected to my invideo project through invideo's MCP server. Every image, clip, sound, effect and edit was made inside invideo; nothing was finished in another editor.

Plan first: Claude read the challenge rules, the submissions feed and my reference (an object-zoom reel), wrote the story and an 8-scene plan (time, location, action, exit portal, camera, SFX), and asked me everything at once. Nothing was generated until I approved.

Nano Banana Pro: character sheets for Kavin, Tharu and Uncle Siri, so they stay consistent across shots.

Kling V3 Omni (ingredients, 1080p, 9:16): 8 shots. Every prompt ends with "the camera pushes into the [opening], which stays centred and fills the frame", so each shot hands off to the next.

ElevenLabs: a 120 BPM tropical-pop / baila-guitar instrumental (first beat at 0.0 s, so every cut lands on a bar) plus 12 SFX: a whoosh on every portal, vadai sizzle, tuk-tuk, kites and gulls, coconut chop + slurp, night crickets, bus stop, phone scroll, notification ping.

The agent wrote Portal Zoom straight into the invideo timeline as a custom transition with exposed controls, then we tuned it cut by cut.

WHAT THE AGENT BUILT Portal Zoom controls: portal centre (x/y), start radius, portal shape (circle / rounded rectangle), rect width/height, corner roundness, edge feather, rim light, rim colour, zoom follow, zoom blur, open-up at end, portal reveal.

WHAT I REFINED

v1 put the portal at his feet instead of his head (the y-axis was flipped). Rebuilt so the portal centre is in screen space (0,0 = top-left).

v1 showed a black ring around the next shot: the incoming frame was smaller than the opening. Rebuilt so the incoming shot is sized to exactly fill the opening, and swapped "incoming start scale" for a new "open-up at end" control.

Tuned every cut from captured frames: lens (0.30, 0.30) r 0.045; vadai hole r 0.025; tuk-tuk mirror r 0.19; bangle r 0.14 (and moved that cut 1.4 s earlier so the ring is still a ring, not the whole frame); coconut r 0.07; moon r 0.13; phone screen as a rounded rectangle (w/h 0.55, roundness 0.12, open-up 2.6 → 1.8).

Rim colour matched to each object: warm on the lens, oil-orange on the vadai, silver on the mirror, gold on the bangle, cool white on the moon, screen blue on the phone.

Cropped the Pettah shot (zoom 1.14, y −120) to hide an AI-gibberish sign, then moved that portal's centre 0.52 → 0.458 to stay inside the hole.

Regenerated the bangle shot: the first take had the studio wall from the reference sheet behind Tharu.

BY THE NUMBERS 48.6 s · 9:16 · 1080p · 8 scenes · 8 portal cuts · 1 custom shader · 3 reference sheets · 8 AI clips · 12 SFX · every frame generated and edited in invideo

@invideo.io @invideo.creators #invideocontrachallenge #invideoeditor invideo Editor is free to try.