DMS-001-DEV-FPS / Portal artwork

Artwork brief

How to replace the six portal images without touching a line of code

The short version. Drop a file called frame-01.jpg into assets/art/ and it replaces the first portal image on next load. Same for frame-02 through frame-06. JPG, PNG, WebP and AVIF all work, in that order of preference. If the file is not there, the SVG that ships with the build is used instead — so nothing breaks and you can do them one at a time.

Specification

Aspect	5:3 landscape Cropped to fill, centred. Keep the subject off the extreme edges.
Size	1600 × 960 Twice what a frame needs, so it holds up on a retina screen.
Weight	Under 250 KB each Six of these load at once. WebP at quality 78 usually lands about 120 KB.
Names	frame-01 … frame-06
Where	assets/art/

What makes these work

The frames are small and sit next to each other, so six busy images become noise. The ones that read at 300 pixels wide have:

One subject

A single object or gesture, not a scene with six things in it.

A dark ground

The film base around them is dark. Bright, white-heavy images fight it.

One warm accent

Tungsten gold against cool shadow. It is the platform's own palette and it is also what a film set looks like.

Room at the edges

The frame crops to 5:3 and the caption sits under it, so anything near the bottom edge is at risk.

Licensing — read before you generate

Do not use stock photographs of real film sets

Almost all of them are rights-managed, and this build is going to be zipped and sent to people. A demo is not editorial use.

Public domain sources that are genuinely safe

Wikimedia Commons (filter to CC0 or public domain), the Smithsonian Open Access collection, the New York Public Library public domain collections, and Pexels or Pixabay under their own licences. Always check the individual file — a permissive site does not make every file on it permissive, and depicted content can still carry trademark or personality rights.

Generated images

Fine for a prototype. Worth a note in the URD that final artwork will be commissioned or licensed, so nobody assumes these ship.

Real people

Avoid recognisable faces entirely. Hands, silhouettes, equipment and backs of heads carry these frames perfectly well and carry no release problem.

Prompts

Paste into whichever image tool you prefer

Each of these describes the same picture the SVG is describing, so the replacement lands in the same slot and means the same thing. The last line of each is the house style and should stay on all six — it is what makes them look like one set rather than six stock photos.

If you would rather not replace them

The six SVGs that ship have just been regraded — halation on the highlights, a warm-to-cool split tone, an anamorphic streak through the brightest band, film grain and a vignette. They are diagrams wearing a photographic finish, which is honest for a prototype: nobody mistakes them for a real production still, and they cannot go out of date or out of licence. Replacing them is an improvement, not a repair.