A Day and a Half: An AI Video Generation Workflow
Concept, brand, script, and a finished twenty-second concept film for a product that does not exist. One desk, a day and a half, and a production pipeline that fits on a single screen.
Vaerik is a fictional brand of calm glasses: eyewear that overlays a quiet landscape onto your route and turns the city down without turning it off. It exists for one reason, to test whether current AI tooling can carry a campaign idea from nothing to a watchable concept film fast enough to matter, with one person doing every job. The answer took a day and a half.
This is a spec exercise and says so. The deliverable is not an ad. It is a concept film: the industry’s honest word for a thing you can watch, respond to, and plan a real production from. What follows is the workflow, told as the three rooms it replaced.
The brand, briefly
The exercise was as much branding as film. Smart glasses currently compete on capture: cameras, recording, AI that watches with you, and a privacy backlash to match, with venues already banning camera glasses at the door. Vaerik was positioned against the entire category. No camera; LiDAR spatial scanning only, depth without images, privacy as architecture rather than a settings toggle. And the product promise borrowed from a category people already love instead of one they distrust: noise cancelling. Wellness, not gadgetry. Turn the city down, never off, across both senses, with the calm imported as an overlay: a dune path, a garden, a forest, threaded through your actual street. Urban space becomes the venue, real corners and boulevards as sites for placed augmented experiences, and the calm itself becomes configurable. You choose what your far-away looks like. The horizon is a setting.
Every downstream decision in the film answers to that positioning: the landscape overlay instead of floating interfaces, the city kept visible and audible, the man waiting at the light. Brand first, then frames.
The writers' room
Everything upstream of the first image happened in conversation with Claude: product thinking, positioning, the claims discipline of what the brand may and may not say, name development, taglines, and finally the script itself, a timed voiceover mapped to a shot sequence before any shot existed. By the time generation started, every creative question already had a written answer. That ordering is the whole method. The tools downstream execute at the speed of the decisions above them, and a missing decision does not slow the pipeline down. It just renders as a weaker film, faster.
The floor
Production ran on the ElevenLabs canvas, a node graph where every model is a card and every dependency is a visible wire. Stills came from Nano Banana 2: character lock, environment lock, wardrobe extracted to a flat-lay, every shot argued about as a cheap still before it became expensive motion. Motion came from Kling 3.0 Pro, prompted with timecode, locked cameras, and one transformation per shot, with Gemini Omni Flash auditioning on shots where a second opinion was worth a generation. Sound never left the building: ambience beds, the city-to-dune crossfade written as a mix note, sirens for the loud half, and one fifty-meter glass vase struck twice by a tennis ball, because sound design is also allowed to play.
The Vaerik production on the ElevenLabs canvas: locks, storyboards, stills, motion, sound, and the voice session, every decision written and every take, including the failures, still on the graph.
The voiceover was directed, not typed. The script came in from the writers’ room, a warm conversational voice carried it, and the brand name had to be respelled, Vaerik, Vaarick, until the voice said it the way the brand does. Pronunciation direction, performed in text. Every discipline on this floor works that way now: casting notes, wardrobe, lens choices, mix automation, all written, all enforced per generation, all visible on the graph next to the takes they produced, including the failed ones.
The cutting room
Nothing assembled itself. The generated material behaved like rushes, uneven, opinionless about order, and the film happened where films happen: in a Final Cut Pro timeline. Shot length, the placement of the one loud moment, the cut to the transition sound rather than the other way around, the decision to hold silence where the mix is the demo. The stack replaced the shoot. It did not replace the edit, and it never touched the judgment.
What a day and a half buys
Not a finished commercial. Faces drift, frames would fail broadcast QC, and none of that is the point. What exists after a day and a half is a decided idea in watchable form: positioning you can hear, art direction you can see, a safety story told by a man waiting calmly at a red light, and a document trail a real production could inherit as its pre-production. The compression is not in the rendering. It is in the distance between a thought and something you can screen for someone.
That distance used to be a budget. Now it is a day and a half, for anyone who knows what the film needs before the tools start agreeing with them.
Vaerik. Fictional brand, spec exercise, 2026.
Concept, creative direction, art direction, copy, edit: Bart Dykstra
Concepting and script: developed with Claude · Stills: Nano Banana 2 · Motion: Kling 3.0 Pro, Gemini Omni Flash · Sound, music, voice: ElevenLabs · Assembly: Final Cut Pro
