Line Dance: Custom Neon Edge-Glow Video Made in InVideoLine Dance: Custom Neon Edge-Glow Video Made in InVideo
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Vinuki's avatar
Vinuki Anujana
• 1d
LINE DANCE: every move he makes leaves a neon line.
Primary effect: Bring your own effect: Line Dance (custom GLSL edge-glow shader, no rotoscoping, no tracking) + two custom transitions: Scribble Wipe and Pixel Stutter
THE IDEA My reference was a short music-video clip: a rapper stands in a plain grey studio while hand-drawn cartoon graphics live around him. An orange flame ribbon turns into a pointing hand, a "!!" pops up, everything stutters into 8-bit pixels and then explodes into big 3D words. The drawings move "on twos" (12 fps), so they feel hand-made, and every gag lands on the beat.
I wanted that energy, but with the drawings coming from the dancer himself. Every move he makes should leave a line.
Before writing anything I read the #invideocontrachallenge feed. About half the real entries are highlight trails or bar reveals. Typography and hand-drawn styles are almost empty, and very few entries have a regional identity. So the plan was a hand-drawn neon effect, kinetic type, and a story that ends in a neon sketch of Colombo.
The story: Dilan, a 20-year-old Sri Lankan street dancer, stands frozen in an empty grey studio. A neon dot draws itself into a cartoon hand that taps his shoulder. "!!" From then on every move leaves a line: a spiral, stars on each step, a flame hand, a whole neon Colombo (Lotus Tower, tuk-tuk, kites), a crowd of doodle dancers. The lines glitch into pixels, wrap him in a tornado and explode into LINE DANCE. Then the lights go out, and only his neon outline keeps dancing.
THE EFFECT The brief rules out object tracking, so the neon can't be "stuck" to him with trackers. Instead, Line Dance finds the edges in every single frame (Sobel edge detection on brightness) and redraws them as a glowing neon line. The outline follows his body automatically, frame by frame. To make it feel hand-drawn, the line gets a noise wobble that only changes 12 times a second (on twos), and the colour cycles cyan → magenta → orange.
Scribble Wipe: a neon zig-zag scribbles across the frame (with a second, lagging stroke) and reveals the next shot behind it.
Pixel Stutter: the 8-bit glitch from the reference. The picture snaps into pixel blocks in hard steps, with colour posterize, RGB split and a tint flicker, and cuts on the middle step. Plus beat-synced shape-layer doodles (stars, an arrow, a dashed loop) and kinetic type.
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 analysed the reference frame by frame, read the challenge rules and the submissions feed, and wrote the full 12-scene story with timings, camera, neon moments, transitions and SFX. Then it asked me everything at once (story, character, how to do the scribbles without tracking, format). Nothing was generated until I approved.
References. Nano Banana Pro made Dilan's character sheet (cream hoodie, rust-orange beanie) and an empty teal-grey studio plate, so every shot matches.
12 clips with Kling V3 Omni (ingredients, 1080p, 9:16), each using both references. Some neon doodles are generated inside the clips (the flame hand, the neon city, the doodle crowd, the spiral tornado).
Sound. An ElevenLabs instrumental (~100 BPM): I checked the waveform first and offset it 0.4 s so the beat drops exactly on the first dance move. 14 ElevenLabs SFX (neon zaps, marker scribbles, boing, 8-bit blips, riser, bass-drop impact, tape-stop) are synced to the moments.
The agent wrote the effects straight into the invideo timeline as custom shaders with exposed controls, then I tuned them.
WHAT THE AGENT BUILT Line Dance controls: line thickness, edge threshold, glow, hand-drawn wobble, frame step (fps), colour cycle speed, neon intensity, picture mix, darken picture, three neon colours. Scribble Wipe controls: zig-zag count, zig-zag height, line width, glow, hand wobble, direction, line colour, second stroke colour. Pixel Stutter controls: max pixel size, stutter steps, colour levels, RGB split, tint flash, tint colour.
WHAT I REFINED
Edge threshold 0.18 → 0.32, glow 0.8 → 0.45, intensity 1.4 → 1.1, thickness 2.5 → 2.0. The first pass lit up the hoodie folds and the concrete floor, and the halo swallowed him. Now it's a clean contour.
Afterglow: picture mix 1 → 0.12 on the lights-out shot, so only his outline survives.
The outline's entrance: neon intensity keyframed 0 → 1.1 over the first beat, so it appears with his first move.
Pixel Stutter: tint flash 0.5 → 0.3 and pixel size 72 → 48 px. At first the whole frame went solid magenta.
Second Scribble Wipe turned sideways (14 zig-zags, magenta) so the two wipes don't repeat.
Popping shot: frame step 12 → 8 and colour cycle 0.35 → 1.2, for a choppier, more electric look.
The hook opened on 0.8 s of plain dancing. I reversed the burst clip so the film opens on full neon and the doodles "un-draw" into the story, and put the outline on frame 1.
The default timeline was 1920×1080 at 24 fps. I switched it to 1080×1920 at 30 fps so every cut sits on the beat grid.
BY THE NUMBERS 52.8 seconds · 9:16 · 1080p · 12 scenes · 2 reference images · 12 AI clips · 1 custom shader on 5 shots · 2 custom transitions on 4 cuts · 4 shape doodles · 14 SFX · ~290 credits · every frame generated and edited in invideo
@invideo.io @invideo.creators #invideocontrachallenge #invideoeditor invideo Editor is free to try.
invideocontrachallenge
Vinuki's avatar
Vinuki Anujana
• 1d
🎬 HOW I MADE LINE DANCE (full process, start to finish)
This is the behind-the-scenes of my entry. I didn't open a single other editor. I directed everything from Claude, connected to my invideo project through invideo's MCP server, and everything you see was generated, built...
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