The Lab

Built in-house at American Fidelity, where we needed to board several competing concepts for a broadcast spot quickly. The flow combines a style reference (a sample of the pencil-sketch treatment) with pools of reference characters — two leads plus supporting cast — so any shot prompt comes out in the same drawing style with the same faces.

The output only reads as real boards because of the shot-writing rules:

• One frame is one camera view and one moment. Dynamic beats get split across frames.
• Prompts describe hard scene facts and explicit facial expressions only — no lighting, color or mood language.
• Every shot prompt stands on its own. Never “same room as before.”

For American Fidelity’s first-ever televised :30, a single script had been going in circles, so I used Claude as a writers’ room. First I wrote down the real constraints: thirty seconds, a low shot count, no on-screen text the viewer has to read, nothing tied to any one industry, and the actual customer at the centre. Then we generated concept directions and pressure-tested each against that sheet, one pass at a time.

The ideas that survived came with their camera logic built in — locked-off frames, or a single continuous lateral move — so each could go straight to boards.

The same approach covers scripting: demo-driven teleprompter scripts for leadership videos, timed to read naturally in 90–120 seconds.

American Fidelity’s video archive was a NAS full of year folders, temp holds and project-file dumps, and people only knew where things were by memory. I mapped it into a structured CSV inventory, then brought that into the team’s documentation board so anyone can find a project, its year and its source files without digging.