Four stages, an identity layer, and an A/B that says the idea is right and the
reason it works is not the reason I expected.
A stage has no image of its own. It owns arrangement — a procession, a
constellation, a soloist, a swarm — and what it arranges comes from the track:
`castMain` and `castChorus` for the forms, `inkMask` and `inkValue` for the hand
they are drawn in. The identity generates a protagonist and a chorus with sides,
notches and hollows, plus an ink treatment of weight, edge, fill, outline and
posterisation. All of it travels as uniforms, so it is data rather than code and
a stage consumes it without knowing any other stage exists.
The protagonist IS the signature form rather than a second opinion about it.
They were separate draws in the first version, which let a track built on
hexagons put a round protagonist on screen — the signature said one thing and
the picture said another, and the shape trait stopped meaning anything for
stages. The cast now reads its geometry from the personality live and adds the
notches and hollows that turn a shape into a character.
Measured across seven songs, three arms, same instrument:
arm floor observed spread
stages, four of them 0.0801 0.1133 +0.0332
legacy scenes, four of them 0.0830 0.1122 +0.0292
the unrestricted generator 0.1058 0.1146 +0.0088
The prediction in EPIC-3 §7 was that sharing a cast would drop the floor
sharply. The floor did drop sharply — by a quarter — but nearly all of that came
from casting FEWER scenes per video, not from sharing content: the legacy arm,
four ordinary scenes with no cast at all, gets most of the same benefit. Stages
add about 14% on top of that.
That is worth knowing before building the other four registers. The single
largest available win was hiding in the roster size all along, and it costs one
number to take.
One result runs the wrong way and is recorded rather than explained: coupling is
+0.29 on the legacy arm and -0.18 on the stages. At twenty-one pairs neither is
distinguishable from zero, so it is a flag for a larger sample rather than a
finding.
Also fixed: a backtick inside the shader preamble's template literal, which
closed it and made every check page hang on "starting…" with no error in the
console.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
