your client said make one like this

the job

the brief is a link and a sentence

“make one like this” is not a brief. it is a reference and a hope, and the gap between them is where the work usually goes: you watch it eleven times, write down what you think they meant, and find out on the review call that they meant something else.

the fix is to stop describing the reference and start reading it. selida reads it, and the read is a link you can send them.

the steps

start to finish, and every step of it is a page

forward their reel into the DM with @heyselida. it does not have to be yours — anything you can share inside instagram, you can forward.
about twenty seconds later a link comes back. that is the page — their reel, filed, with everything selida has read of it so far, and it is yours to keep whether or not anything else happens.
if the reel is an ad, the shot-by-shot read of it takes longer than the page does and is not allowed to hold it up, so it lands on its own. the board appears on that same page — every shot, the camera, the look, what was on screen, what was said — and a message tells you what the ad turned out to be made of and carries one link to your version of it. this is the page to send the client: it describes what they asked for in shots rather than in adjectives.
tell selida whose voice this is — one website, one handle. it reads the site and writes only from what is on it.
if the ad puts a product on screen, selida asks you for a photograph of it. the slot is the top of your version’s page, and their brand page holds the same one for every reel after this. a photo sent into the thread is not kept — it gets pointed at the slot instead. the first one you add starts the writing.
the rebuilt script comes back before anything renders: the same shots, your client’s product, their words. read it. if a claim is off, the box under it on that page rewrites it.
check who is on camera — a presenter and a room for a talking head, the reel’s own places for an ad, and nobody at all when the ad had nobody, where a voice is picked instead of a face — then shoot it.
the film lands in the thread, and every page stays in your library.

what you can show

every step is a page with a link on it

the read is a page. the script is a page. the video is a page. you are never asking a client to trust a description of what you are about to do — you send them the thing itself, at the point where changing it is still cheap.

it is also the answer to “why does this cost what it costs”: the read is on screen, in shots, and it is the part of the job that used to be invisible.

the next one

a site you have read once stays read

the website is read the first time and kept. the next reel for the same client starts from what selida already knows about them, and you can hold several clients side by side and pick which one a rebuild is for.

their photographs keep the same way. once one is on their brand page it is on file, and the ad you forward next week is written without anybody being asked for it again.

the money

what it costs you to serve a client who is still deciding

nothing. the read is free, putting their photograph on file is free and the writing is free, so a client who wants to see all three before they commit costs you nothing to serve. the film is the part that costs, and it is the only part that does.

what a video costs