Central Park: a visual history

the prompt

Make a visual history of Central Park as Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed it, in two parts: a short history film drawn like an architect's drawings, and an interactive 3D park that runs in the browser, where you click into every place and learn its story. Context you should know: this is going into a video watched by a large audience. Your film is played and your build is explored on camera next to other frontier models given this identical prompt. The person using it is about to attend a talk on Olmsted's landscape experiment and wants to arrive knowing all the most interesting things about how the park was made. The comparison is blind. Never put your model name, your company's name, or any mention of which AI made it anywhere in what you build: not in on-screen text, credits, the page title, file names, code comments, or metadata. Research first, from real historical sources: the 1858 Greensward Plan competition, Olmsted and Vaux's design ideas, the park's major landscapes and structures, and how the park was actually built. Every fact, date and name in the build must come from a source; list your sources in the README and in an on-screen sources panel. **The 3D must be beautiful. This is judged strictly.** A sweeping 3D Central Park set in its Manhattan grid: real topography, water, meadows, woodland, rock outcrops, paths and bridges, with natural lighting, atmosphere and seasons that feel alive. No grey boxes, flat green planes or placeholder trees. **Interesting, never boring.** Lead with the surprising, the dramatic and the little-known: the stories, numbers, fights, feats of engineering, hidden details and things a visitor walks past without noticing. Cut anything that reads like a textbook. Every fact is told visually, in the 3D, with a few lines of text at most. Requirements: **Part 1: the history film, 60 to 120 seconds.** **Follow the skill for the film.** Clone https://github.com/per-simmons/launch-video-clone and read its SKILL.md first, then the type files and motion rules it points to, and make the film with it in its Original mode (no reference video). Its motion rules, pacing and QA loop apply to the film. No generic HyperFrames animation: do not use its registry blocks, stock templates, preset transitions or default fade/slide/scale-in motion. Every drawing, line build, transition and type move is designed and animated custom for this film, to the standard of a hand-crafted architectural animation, and the skill's motion rules decide timing and easing. If a moment looks like a template, it is not done. 1. **Drawn like an architect's drawings.** Plan views, sections, elevations and perspective sketches in fine ink linework on paper, with hand lettering, survey grids and washes of colour, drawing themselves on screen. Think of the 1858 competition boards coming to life. 2. **The story of the park as a journey.** From the land before the park existed, through the design competition and construction, to the park today. The drawings build, transform and move between eras so the history is shown, not told. 3. **Sound.** A score and sound design you make yourself; narration or on-screen captions are your choice. 4. **Deliver** it as an MP4 at 1920x1080, and also play it inside the interactive park (Part 2) as its intro, with a skip button. **Part 2: the interactive park.** 5. **Fly the park.** A 3D Central Park in its Manhattan grid you can orbit and zoom, with smooth, cinematic camera moves. 6. **Click into everything.** Every key place, structure and landscape in the park is clickable. Clicking flies you there and opens its story: what it is, why it was designed that way, and its most interesting facts, told with the 3D and the same architectural drawings from the film, with a few lines of text at most. Navigate between places from a map or list as well as by clicking in the 3D. 7. **How the design works.** Make the clever parts visible in 3D and explorable: how the paths, drives and sunken transverse roads keep traffic apart, how views and landscapes were composed, how much of what looks natural was made by hand. 8. **Then and now.** The original Greensward Plan beside the park today, with a timeline you can scrub, and the 3D park changing as you scrub. 9. **Runs at a smooth frame rate** in a desktop browser at 1920x1080. 10. **Deliver** a runnable project with a documented run command and a README with your sources. DONE when: the history film plays start to finish in its architectural drawing style, you can fly the whole park and click into every key place to get its story, the design ideas and the then-and-now comparison are clear on screen, the facts are genuinely interesting and every one is sourced, it runs smoothly, and every frame is beautiful.

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