Movement: the Leap — brief (draft)

Part 3 of the home page; can also stand alone (e.g. on a join/movement page). Sources: first outflow, animation detail.

Feeling

Walking into the unknown. Scary, and yet we hold the possibility of renewal. A leap of faith, then a gentle opening. Ends in a warm, concrete invitation to join.

Source image

moodboard/leap-collage-walkers-torn-field.png. A black-and-white photo collage: a line of people in dark coats walk away from us along a road into heavy grey clouds. Ahead of them, a torn-paper hole opens onto colour: a yellow flower field under blue sky.

The dream: animate this image itself. Use the people from the picture as walking figures, not new illustrations.

Script

Scroll-driven (for now): a tall track with a sticky full-screen stage; scrolling scrubs the scene forwards and backwards. Playing once on entering view was tried in discussion and set aside.

Beat	What you see	Text	Where
1. The cliff	Empty. Grey clouds, the road, no people, no tear. The road simply ends in sky, like a cliff edge.	The future may be dark and unknown.	Top, over the sky
2. Walking	The people walk in and up the road, one by one. Real walking figures (walk cycles), not sliding cutouts if possible. Tension builds: they are about to walk off the edge of the sky. Line 1 fades out a moment before line 2, leaving a beat of just the walkers.	(line 1 fades)
3. The rip	Just as the rip starts, line 2 appears. As the leaders near the edge, the paper tears gently, top down, as if pulled from the top. Not violent. Reveals the yellow field and blue sky; the road now leads into it and the walkers step into the field.	But the unknown is also full of possibility.	Top, where line 1 was; held through the rip
4. Join	The scene settles. Line 2 fades; the invitation appears as the story's last beat, not a footer.	Come join us. Meet others on our Thursday calls.	Over the image, lower third, on a soft dark gradient
5. Onward	A quiet "keep learning" path on to the Book (part 4).	or keep learning ↓	Under the join, smaller

Hierarchy: Come join us is the main action (display type, the link); the Thursday line is small beneath it; "keep learning" is smaller still. The join links to a page explaining the call (what, when, sign up), not straight to a Zoom or calendar link. Fallback: if the join doesn't read over the image on phones, move it below the image at phone width only.

Craft notes

Clean plate needed: the start frame has no people and no tear, so we need the scene without both. Best: find the original photo(s) the collage was made from (reverse image search). Fallback: remove people and tear by inpainting (retouch/AI fill), and rebuild the field as its own layer.
Figures: cut each walker out as a layer. Walking gait via cutout puppetry (split legs/arms, subtle bob) or AI/rotoscope-generated walk cycles from the stills.
The tear: paper, rough white fibrous edge with slight depth and shadow, as in the image. Opens top down, gently.
No logo. What's behind the tear is the field.

Open questions

Join link: the URL of the Thursday call page (# until it exists).
A different direction, not taken for now: rip away much more of the background, show more of the field, and write the join there.
Does colour spill out of the tear into the rest of the frame, or stay contained?