amitdeshmukh/banger-ads

Banger ads

An ad is a person, a clock, and a number. The product is a whisper at the end. This skill holds a method for ads that make people feel something and understand something, the corrections a demanding director gave across two real builds, and a pipeline that renders a finished spot for about $10 in any visual style. Nothing here assumes a product, a character, or a look; the brief supplies those. Two complete builds are the worked examples: Face Down v5, a narrated story film (references/face-down-example.md), and One Day, a silent split-frame film built clip by clip (references/one-day-example.md). Between them they cover both formats this pipeline makes.

Two formats

Pick one at intake; they are written and built differently.

1. The story film (Face Down). One person, a clock, a number, a narrator. The banger rules below are its rules. Sixty to eighty seconds.
2. The day film (One Day). No voice. One frame, two halves: a person living on the left, the product's real screen working on the right; several people in several industries across one day; three-sentence captions carry every word. Its rules: at least ten seconds per person (five people in 45 s was "fast for humans to process"); every screen shows a real job the product does, in the product's own tokens; captions are whole sentences a stranger can follow; a city-scale open, then cut to the first person; no shot that carries no information (empty places were cut: "what purpose they serve?"); the close is the product's promise in three lines on one screen, then the wordmark. Shape from the Qwen 3.8 launch film, mapped in references/reference-films.md.

When the director hands over a reference film ("exactly like this one"), map it first (references/reference-films.md), copy the skeleton, and never the people or the lines.

The rule above all the others

The banger rules produce feeling. They do not produce understanding. An ad needs both. Face Down v4 got "this is BANGER" from the director and could not tell a stranger what the character's problem was, why she was awake, what the product did, or what it would do for them. So the cold reader (references/cold-reader.md) is the gate between the two: a viewer with no context explains the ad back before the director sees the script, and again before any render. A script that feels right and does not explain back is not done.

What a demanding director judges by

These rules came from one director's corrections across two films, in this order. A draft that fails the first three reads as "bland", however clean it is. Examples are from Face Down; the rules are general.

1. It starts inside the struggle. The first line is a moment, with a time on it. "Two-fourteen in the morning. That's Dana's phone." A first line that describes the person stops nobody.
2. A person speaks. The narration sounds like something said at a kitchen table. Numbers are the dialogue.
3. The killer lines survive the runtime. When a cut is too long, cut padding or let the film run longer. The director accepted 80 seconds for "approx 45". The director rejected a version that hit the length by cutting the best line.
4. The setting is one the audience has stood in. Ask: who has to see themselves in the first shot? An online store beat a stamping plant because everyone has had a checkout fail.
5. The product is withheld, then defined once, bigger than the scene. No name for the first third. Then one sentence that says what it is for the whole business, in the brief's own words if it has them, never a sentence that shrinks it to the one scene it is in.
6. One gesture carries the film. A phone turned face down. A thumb on glass. The gesture is the climax and gets silence.
7. The ending reframes the opening. The first image returns, changed.
8. The voice ends on the brand name. The URL is on screen. Nobody says "dot com".
9. No jargon, anywhere. Everyday words a retired teacher who shops online understands on first hearing. See the jargon list in references/cold-reader.md.
10. The viewer has never heard of the product. Establish the person and what they do in the first ten seconds, show the problem on screen, define the product once, say every step it took, close with what it does for the viewer.
11. Plain English constructions. If a phrase would look odd in a newspaper, it is odd in the ad.
12. Every heard or read line is the director's words or their explicit yes. Silence after a proposal is not a yes. Nothing renders before sign-off. Never invent an offer, a price, a trial, or a duration.
13. One clip at a time. The director authorises each clip before the next ("i want to authorize each"). Build every clip as its own composition so a note costs a one-minute render, and show it alone before assembling.
14. Every line on screen is a sentence. Labels, pills, and middot chains fail a cold reader ("as a cold reader i cant relate to it"). Who the person is and what they are doing, each in a full sentence.
15. The product helps; it never watches. "Watches your business", "AI that watches", "keeps an eye on" read as surveillance and one director banned them as hostile. Write the AI as help. The tagline shape that replaced them: "AI that helps run your business." The brand guide holds the exact wording.
16. The director reads the frame edge for edge. Grain on one half, a hard-edged scrim, a laptop template, a character who walks the wrong way: the director sees them in the first viewing. Crop the edges and compare regions before sending; see references/production-runbook.md, "Learned on One Day".

Workflow

1. Intake, run first every time

The director may never have made an ad. Walk them through references/intake.md: twenty-five questions in six batches (what we are selling; who is watching and where; the story; the voice; the look; money, time, and sign-off). Each question there carries why it matters, a default, and a Face Down example. Ask three or four at a time, use the AskUserQuestion tool where it exists so choices are clickable with the recommended option first, and skip anything the director already answered. Write the answers and every assumption into projects/<film>/brief.md from assets/brief-template.md, show it, and get a yes before concepts. The brief is the contract; every later step reads it.

What the intake must settle before anything is written:

• Product and brand. The product in the director's words, where the brand rules live (a brand guide if the brand has one; otherwise its site), what may be claimed, what must never be said. No offers unless the director gives them.
• Audience. Default: a stranger who has never heard of the product and only vaguely knows the category.
• Platform and length. Default: one film for TV and web, 60 to 80 seconds; a silent site-hero loop is a separate cut.
• Story. The person, the setting, the pain with a time on it, the product's steps, the gesture, the real numbers.
• Voice. Narrator or character; a named Gemini TTS voice; any lines wanted verbatim; the voice ends on the brand name.
• Visual style. One paragraph that becomes the bible's style_guide: photoreal, animation, illustration, mixed. The pipeline is style-agnostic.
• Art direction. Everything on top of the footage is the director's call: notices, the card, timecodes, the ending treatment, logo on or off, text marks and strokes, colour grammar. Face Down's calls (overlay on the last frames, no cat, centred text, a chalk stroke in acid green under the URL only) are examples of direction, never defaults.
• Money and sign-off. Budget cap (default $15), approval checkpoints (sheet, test shot, full pass, render), line-by-line sign-off on every heard or read word, test viewers.

2. Concept

Offer three to six concepts. Each is one emotion hiding one feature. Format: logline, the film in four sentences, the emotion, the hidden feature, why it will get shared. Recommend one. references/concepts.md holds the concept format and the five tests any concept must pass.

Rules that produced the good ones: personal stakes only (sleep, a child, a job, a name remembered); the villain is time; fear then relief; hands and faces; sound design carries pain and pleasure.

3. Script

Write beats with timings using the story-style structure in references/copy-rules.md: hook inside the struggle, struggle with specifics, discovery with the product named and defined, transformation with numbers and a timeline, silence for the gesture, a close that ends on the name. Every number from a real scenario. Mechanism in everyday words, every step in order. Brand on screen by a third of the way in, on a card the character reads. Five hooks for the first five seconds, one per type. Banned-pattern pass, hedge-word pass, jargon pass. Read it aloud in your head.

Show the director the script as a table (beat, time, shot, line, on screen) with the so-what chain under it. Ask for sign-off line by line.

4. Cold read

Run references/cold-reader.md on the narration and screen text, twice, with two viewers. Explain-back, four questions, jargon list, confidence. A script that misses the bar goes back to the writer. Not optional.

5. Voiceover

One track, one named voice, generated per line and placed at its cue by scripts/narrate.py. Direct for pace ("about 160 words per minute, pauses under a third of a second"), cap pauses, chain cues off measured ends, use a 5% tempo on a long line if sync needs it. Each line is cached by its text, so a changed line re-buys only itself. Check sync as a table of shot spans against line spans.

6. Production

The pipeline lives in Video; references/production-runbook.md has the commands, costs, and every gotcha. The shape: hand-write bible.json and shots.json (any style, any characters), --assets-only for sheets, then the one-attempt order from the runbook's "Omni 1.1 Flash" section: first/last keyframes per shot (approved as a contact sheet), a 360p draft of every shot (approved clip by clip), then one final pass at delivery resolution, scripts/post_cut.py (trims, grade, per-shot edge crop, last-frame hold, voice mix), then HyperFrames overlays from assets/hf-overlay-template.html with the brand's fonts and palette. Print shots.json before any paid run. Watch every generated shot to its last frame before cutting it in.

For the day film, or whenever the director wants to authorise each clip: one HyperFrames composition per clip (assets/hf-clip-open-template.html, assets/hf-clip-vignette-template.html, assets/hf-clip-tail-template.html), rendered separately with PNG frame extraction and assembled by ffmpeg concat (assets/one-day-concat.txt). Plates: the best seven seconds of each Omni clip slowed to ten with motion interpolation, crops baked in with lanczos, never scaled in CSS. Screens: built in HTML from the product's own design tokens and real component layouts, Python on screen and never SQL, a drawn device rather than a template. Commands and every gotcha in references/production-runbook.md, "Learned on One Day".

7. Review with the director

Send the sheet, the test clip, contact sheets, then the render as a preview encode under 7 MB with the master's path. When a decision is needed, restate each option in the same message with its consequence. When the director answers "sure", say which option you took. The director interrupts fast and says why; take the correction, fix it, name in one line what was wrong. Before claiming a tool cannot do something, read its docs in the session.

Clearance for TV

Claims map to shipped code or the brief. Characters are fictional; no customer named or implied. Captions, a 4:3 title-safe area, broadcast loudness (-24 LKFS US, -23 LUFS EU). 1080p for air: upscale the 720p master or regenerate hero shots at 2K on MiniMax H3.

Status

Drafted from the Face Down build and made product-agnostic, then tested on a second real ad, One Day, whose corrections are folded in (rules 13 to 16, the second format, the clip-by-clip build, the runbook section "Learned on One Day"). The prompts in evals/evals.json are ready for a formal comparison. The two finished films are described in full in their example files.

References

• Nano Banana character consistency, 12 prompts that work (2026 guide): https://www.nenobanana.com/blogs/nano-banana-character-consistency-12-prompts-that-actually-work--2026-guide. Source of the sheet anchors.
• Rob Palmer's ad-copy skill: https://robpalmer.com/blog/claude-code-ad-copy-skill and https://github.com/robpalmer99/claude-code-copywriting-skills.
• Gemini Omni Flash docs: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/omni.
• MiniMax H3 video API: https://platform.minimax.io/docs/guides/video-generation.md.

Files in this skill

• references/intake.md: the twenty-five intake questions for a first-time director, with why, defaults, and examples. Run first.
• references/copy-rules.md: the direct-response method under a brand's rules, hook types, checklist, register, runtime.
• references/cold-reader.md: the explain-back test, the bar, the jargon list.
• references/production-runbook.md: commands, costs, gotchas for Nano Banana, Omni, Gemini TTS, MiniMax H3, ffmpeg, HyperFrames, shell.
• references/concepts.md: the concept format, where good concepts come from, and the five tests.
• references/face-down-example.md: the complete build of Face Down v5, end to end (brief, direction, world, shots, narration with cues, on-screen elements with timings, cold read, commands, costs, deliverables), with the history of every round underneath. Start here when building a story film.
• references/one-day-example.md: the complete build of One Day, the silent split-frame film: brief, device, structure, people, plates, screens, captions, the clip-by-clip build, cold read, and what it taught. Start here when building a day film or working clip by clip.
• references/reference-films.md: how to download and map a reference film, with the Monaco founder film and the Qwen 3.8 launch film mapped.
• scripts/narrate.py, scripts/post_cut.py: narration and cut tools; live copies in Video/.
• assets/brief-template.md: the brief the intake fills in; the contract for the film.
• assets/: the HyperFrames overlay composition (swap fonts, palette, card text), the outro check composition, Face Down's bible, shots, and vo as format examples; the One Day clip compositions (hf-clip-open-template.html, hf-clip-vignette-template.html, hf-clip-tail-template.html), its bible and shots (one-day-bible.json, one-day-shots.json), and the concat list for assembly.