Video creative rules

The confirmed brief owns direction. The human owns every creative decision. Studio owns revisions, exact export and review evidence. This skill owns the rules the production agent applies in between, and the checks that turn those rules into review findings.

Who decides what

If a rule below conflicts with the confirmed brief, the brief wins and the conflict is reported in the candidate summary. If a rule conflicts with a human instruction, the instruction wins.

The laws

1. Short. The cut is as long as the brief's deliverable needs and not one scene longer. A launch or announcement is 15 to 25 seconds. A lesson segment is as long as its one idea. Every scene must earn its place.
2. Readable. Pace comes from motion, cuts and light, never from pulling text before it can be read. Every line holds for its floor (references/reading-time.md). Fast in, then hold. Never fast in, then gone.
3. Specific. The cut must feel made for this exact product, person or lesson. Use the source's own words and claims. No copy that could belong to any video.
4. Show the real thing. At least one scene carries real footage, real UI or real copy from the source. Real frames beat recreations: capture the running product first, recreate only chrome. Abstract filler, stock motion and color washes are not scenes.
5. The hook is the first two seconds. Plan the hook before anything else. It is an image, a line or a motion, and it decides whether the rest gets watched.
6. Restraint over decoration. No stingers, risers, whooshes on every cut, lens flares, particles or visualizer graphics. Sound and motion support the story.
7. Honest. No claim beyond the brief and the source. Keep the source's own caveats when it has them. Every music, SFX and image in the plan carries a source and a public-distribution status.

Shape to start from, not a template: hook (2 to 3s), reveal (2 to 4s), two or three highlights (5 to 12s), landing (2 to 4s). Adapt it to the brief's workflow (references/tone-presets.md).

The three gates

1. Plan gate (after confirmBrief, before the first edit)

Read references/plan-rubric.md. Then:

• Answer the rubric, including question 9 (entry, key action, result). If the source has no flow, write "no flow" and say what carries the cut instead.
• Commit to one angle and one hook.
• Write the storyboard with, per scene: what is on screen, every text line with its settled window, sequential or simulated interaction, audio intent, transition.
• Compute each scene's text budget (references/reading-time.md) and cut copy until every scene fits.
• Write a rights line for every music, SFX and image asset.
• Save the storyboard as storyboard.json in the work directory and register it with register_artifact. Run scripts/check-reading-time.mjs storyboard.json. A blocking finding means the plan is not done. Studio runs the same check on that file when it prepares a review, so its findings reach the human either way.

2. Cut gate (before requesting an export)

• Re-run the reading-time check against the timings you actually built.
• Beat locks: at most three strong-cue locks, marked in the plan with their time (references/beat-policy.md). Sequential readable lines never land on consecutive beats.
• Audio mix inside the policy (references/audio-policy.md); the game or product's own audio is preferred when its rights line allows it.
• Every reading-time or budget finding is either fixed or listed in the candidate summary with a reason. Findings are category: brief, so they need the human, not an unattended repair.

3. Delivery gate (export and handoff)

Read references/delivery-gates.md. Loudness is normalized to the target, the poster is a settled frame baked as frame 0, each required format is planned as a reframe with its own text budget, and the share copy is one caption in the brief's voice.

Files

The storyboard format the checker reads:

{
  "scenes": [
    {
      "id": "s2",
      "start": 3.0,
      "end": 7.5,
      "texts": [
        {
          "id": "s2-card",
          "text": "Ada planned it. Tuck built it. Pip checked it.",
          "kind": "line",
          "settledStart": 4.05,
          "settledEnd": 7.5
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

settledStart is when the text is fully in; settledEnd is when it starts to leave. kind is label (three words or fewer) or line; it is inferred when omitted. optional: true marks text that is not required reading (a footnote, a HUD label): it is still checked against its own floor, but it does not count toward the scene budget or the sequential spacing rule.