A director once slipped an invented exercise into a script without saying so, and that moment is written into my video-director skill as the reason for its first non-negotiable. Every line the skill writes now carries a label saying where it came from, and anything it made up has to be approved by the person who will say it on camera.
The skill acts as a director and producer so the person in front of the camera only has to act. The person I had in mind has plenty worth saying and would rather spend their attention on the performance than on the camera.
It starts from what you’ve already written
The skill opens with intake, asking at most three questions per message, because a wall of questions is the first reason a busy person quits. It then asks which documents, pages, past posts or recordings already describe the person’s work and point of view, and reads only those. It never searches their whole Drive, and with no sources it writes no ideas and says so. Confidential material like pricing, client names and investor documents stays out of every script unless the person explicitly agrees, and any claim about their own life has to come from them before it’s scripted.
From those sources it brings back four to eight video ideas, each traced to the passage it grew from, with a spoken hook, the single idea, one thing a viewer can do today, and the call to action.
Every line carries a label
Scripts come as shot units of one or two sentences, built as a hook, the intrigue, the delivery and an exit, and the default is one thought in 40 to 60 seconds, about 105 to 150 words. Each line is marked VERBATIM when it’s the person’s exact words from a named source, ADAPTED when it’s their idea reshaped for speech, NEW when the skill wrote it, and TRUE? when it’s a personal or factual claim that needs confirming. The script only passes once the person has seen the current version, approved every NEW line and confirmed every TRUE? line. Confirming a fact also doesn’t approve a sentence built around it, so “I managed restaurants for eight years” being true says nothing about the line the skill wrapped it in. When the person’s own wording breaks the craft, the skill adapts it and explains why, and if they still want their original, their words win.
Chris Goor’s camera craft
The camera craft comes from Chris Goor, a former broadcast camera supervisor who teaches experts to make phone video, and the credit belongs to him. The first version of the playbook paraphrased his rules with the source video noted beside each one, and marked my own additions “(ours)” so nobody would mistake them for his. The skill is also told never to invent craft authority, so it can’t claim a number or a “what pros do” that the playbook doesn’t give.
The shoot plan draws on that craft, starting with a shot list and a one-page call sheet for the place the person will actually be, with the time of day for the light, what to wear and how each shot hands over to the next, so walk-outs, head turns and sitting into frame take the place of jump cuts. Camera instructions are written for the person’s own phone, every film term gets explained in plain words the first time it appears, and each instruction comes with a one-line reason. The test I gave it is whether someone who has never been on a film set could follow the sheet alone, in a field, on their phone.
After the shoot
The companion video-dailies skill reviews what came back. It inventories every clip, builds contact sheets, flags wind, clipping and silent mics, reads spoken slates and checks framing against the shot list, then proposes the best take for each shot for the person to confirm and writes a reshoot list. It refuses to write into a synced folder or a code repository, since the contact sheets are stills of people and places.
Everything lives on one page per video, and nothing is put to the person for approval until they’ve seen it there in full.
What isn’t built yet
I started the skill on September 22, 2026, and version 1.1.7 landed on October 12. The step that automatically cuts a directed shoot together, picking the chosen take for each shot, laying voiceover over B-roll and holding the empty frames between walk-outs, isn’t built yet. Until it is, the take log and the shot list are what an editor works from, and my video-production plugin handles the sound, transcript and captions.