| name | ugc-video |
| description | Direct phone-shot video with a person in it — UGC ads, creator testimonials, review-to-hero spots, comedy sketches, day-in-the-life and ritual pieces, first-person travel vlogs. Use when the user wants a video that looks self-filmed or friend-filmed, mentions UGC, TikTok, Reels, a creator, a testimonial, a talking-head ad, or names a person as the subject of a multi-shot video. Not for polished product films (use product-commercial) or narrated b-roll with no talent (use script-video). |
Load /storyboard-core first. It carries the loop, the tool contract,
the entity rules and the gating this skill assumes. Everything below is what is
different about a phone-shot piece with a person in it.
What makes this job type its own
The face is the deliverable. One character entity has to survive every shot, and the
look has to read as a phone rather than a camera. Both are set once, on the board, and
never re-argued in shot text.
Casting comes first, and it is two passes
There is no create-from-text, and a face you have not seen is a face you cannot lock.
find_model (text_to_image) → generate_image with the character description
alone: age, build, skin, hair, no wardrobe, no set, front-lit, neutral expression.- Show it. If the user likes it,
create_entity {asset_id, kind: "character", name, descriptor}. The descriptor is the face and hair only.
- After the first board stills come back, if a frame reads better than the reference,
update_entity {entity_id, asset_id} to move the entity onto that crop. Do this
before clips, not after.
Given a photo instead: save it as an asset, then create_entity from it. Write the
descriptor from the face and hair in the photo and leave the photo's outfit out —
wardrobe belongs in shot text, so the same entity can wear a gym set in one board and
a coat in the next.
The look goes in the board style, once
Put the camera pretence in style via set_board, never in each shot:
| Register | style |
|---|
| Front-camera UGC | handheld front-camera iPhone, mild shake, autofocus hunt, compression grain, window daylight, no beauty filter |
| Friend-filmed | handheld phone at arm's length, natural wind and room noise, slightly off-level framing |
| Old-phone ritual | old iPhone 1x, propped static angle, fluorescent tint, heavy noise |
| Vlog | chest-height phone gimbal, wide lens, natural light, mild bloom |
No music, no score, no burned-in captions. Natural audio is part of the register — say
so in the brief so the video model does not add a bed.
Shot pattern
Five to eight shots. A hook in the first four seconds, a middle that shows the thing
happening physically, and a verdict to camera.
- Dialogue is a shot field, not part of
action. Set dialogue so
extract_script_from_storyboard can lift the words later if the user wants them
voiced properly.
- Write the physical beat in
motion with a count: two short spray bursts,
two head turns, she lifts one section of hair and lets it fall, once. "She
reacts" renders as nothing.
- A talent-free end card (pack hero, logo card) needs its own
entity_ids naming the
product alone — otherwise the character's descriptor seasons a shot she is not in.
- Native-audio video models are weakest on their image path. For a shot whose spoken
line has to look synced, set
render_mode: "direct" and put the framing and style
into the action text, since no still carries them in.
Wardrobe and state
One outfit per piece unless the script changes it on camera. A wet, stained or
changed-outfit version of the same person is a second entity — cast it the same
way and name it in the shots where it applies.
Briefs
references/briefs.md has four written to these rules: review-to-hero UGC ad,
Pinterest-fail comedy, locker-room ritual, and a night-city vlog with a shot-collapse
step. Replace the bracketed placeholders and hand one over after the standing orders.
