| name | video-factory-creative-direction |
| description | The motion taste layer for a video — lock one coherent look across every shot before any generation happens. Owns register, pacing, camera language, color and grade, light, grain/texture, and brand fit, so a multi-shot piece reads as one director shot it rather than a pile of clips. The motion analog of design-imagery. Use this skill any time a video needs art direction: setting the visual system for a brand film, keeping a background loop on-brand, grading decisions, or course- correcting clips that came back looking like different videos. Third stage of the Video Factory chain; reads a storyboard, writes a direction spec that video-factory-higgsfield-prompt turns into model parameters and prompt language. Actively rejects the drone-city / glowing-AI motion clichés.
|
| type | skill |
| project | skills-library |
| plugin | video-factory |
| aliases | ["video-creative-direction","motion-direction","art-direction-video","video-look"] |
| tags | ["type/skill","plugin/video-factory","scope/specialty","topic/video","topic/art-direction"] |
| status | active |
Video Factory — Creative Direction
Concept decides what the video is. Storyboard decides which shots. This skill decides how it all looks — and, critically, makes sure every shot looks like it belongs to the same film. The failure mode this skill exists to prevent: shot one is golden-hour, shot two is cold studio, shot three is a different grain — three clips, not one video. Generative video drifts by default; direction holds it.
Load ../../references/video-factory-foundations.md for the registers, the motion anti-clichés, and the brand defaults. This skill is the motion sibling of design/skills/design-imagery — same art-direction discipline, applied to moving image.
When to invoke
- A storyboard exists and the look needs to be locked before generation (normal path).
- Clips came back inconsistent and need a system imposed retroactively.
- A video must visually match a companion deck or campaign — pull the imagery system across.
- Any "make it feel more premium / more like us / less AI" request.
Lock the look: the direction spec
Decide each of these once, for the whole piece, and hold it across every shot:
- Register. One of the foundations registers (editorial-tech, premium-restrained, kinetic, material, anamorphic-cinematic). This is the master decision; everything else serves it. Slalom defaults: editorial-tech for technical pieces, premium-restrained for executive.
- Pacing. Cut rhythm and motion speed. Slow and deliberate, or quick and kinetic. Name shot-to-shot timing feel, not just per-shot.
- Camera language. The vocabulary of moves allowed — e.g. "only slow pushes and locked frames; no orbits, no handheld." Constraining the move set is what makes a piece feel directed.
- Light signature. Direction, quality, temperature. "Single cool sidelight, soft, high shadow detail" held across all shots. Mixed light signatures are the #1 tell of an undirected video.
- Color & grade. Palette anchors (3–5 colors), contrast level, and a grade direction (e.g. "cool shadows, neutral mids, slight teal lift; low saturation"). This is what a colorist would do in post; specify it up front so the keyframes are generated into it.
- Grain / texture / finish. Clean digital, 35mm grain, anamorphic flare, VHS — the surface treatment. Subtle is usually right for B2B.
- Brand fit. Slalom / Composable DXP / client. Confirm palette and motion language don't fight the brand.
- What we're NOT doing. The explicit anti-cliché list for this piece, carried into every negative prompt.
The imagery-family rule, for motion
Every keyframe and every clip must share the light signature, palette, grain, and camera language above. When the prompt stage generates keyframes, this spec is the consistency contract — same light, same grade, same grain, shot to shot. If a clip drifts off-spec, it's rejected and regenerated, not shipped because it's "good enough on its own."
Four checks before sign-off
Borrowed from design-taste, adapted to motion:
- Swap. Could this look sit on a competitor's site unchanged? If yes, it's generic — push the look harder toward the brand.
- Squint. Blur it. Does the color/light read as one coherent piece, or do shots fall apart? Mixed signatures show up worst at a squint.
- Signature. Is there one memorable visual move that's this video's signature (a specific light behavior, a recurring framing, a grade)? Undirected video has none.
- Cliché. Run the anti-cliché list. Any drone-city, glowing-AI, data-rain, sunrise-as-transformation creeping in? Cut it.
Output format
Write 30_Direction.md in the run's WIP folder — the direction spec as the eight decisions above, each stated concretely (not "premium" but "soft single sidelight from camera-left, cool 5600K, low saturation, slight teal-lifted shadows, fine 35mm grain"). Add a one-paragraph look statement a stakeholder could read to picture the film, and the NOT list verbatim for the prompt stage to paste into negatives.
Examples
Example 1 — premium-restrained executive film. Register: premium-restrained. Pacing: slow, long holds, dissolves not cuts. Camera: locked frames + one slow push per shot, nothing else. Light: soft single sidelight camera-left, cool, generous shadow. Grade: low saturation, cool shadows, neutral skin, gentle contrast. Grain: fine, filmic. NOT: no glowing-blue tech, no drone establishing shot, no speed-ramps. Signature: every shot breathes — a barely-there push that never arrives.
Example 2 — material-register background loop. Register: material/textured-realism. Pacing: continuous, no cuts. Camera: locked; the subject moves, not the lens. Light: hard raking sidelight to read surface texture, cool. Grade: desaturated steel-and-navy, crushed blacks. Grain: clean digital, slight bloom on highlights. NOT: no circuit/neural motifs, no rainbow refraction clichés. Signature: light slowly traveling across the material so the loop feels alive without going anywhere.
Constraints
- One register per piece. If two registers are fighting, the video isn't directed.
- Specify light and grade concretely enough that two different keyframes generate into the same look.
- Carry the NOT list into generation — direction that isn't enforced in the negatives doesn't survive the model.
- Don't let "good clip" override "on-spec clip." Consistency is the deliverable; a great-but-off-look shot breaks the family.
- For background loops, direction must keep the look calm enough that the headline wins. Drama that drowns the text is a direction failure, not a generation failure.
