Seventeen seconds: a red-haired champion, a jittery rookie, tea from a tartan thermos and a shot at sunrise. There isn't a single real frame in this ad. AI agents wrote it, cast it, shot it and cut it, each in its own role. My job was to approve things and reject things.
The ad is for Clay Sniper, my iPhone and Apple Watch logbook for clay shooters. It took three days, October 7–9, from the approved plan to the final file: two for the shoot and the first cut, and one more for polishing. Here's who did what, which ideas went into it, and where it nearly fell apart.
Clay Sniper already has an App Preview on the App Store, and it's honest: a screen recording of the real app, the watch, a real gunshot sound. Apple doesn't accept anything else there. But that video only works for people who've already opened the product page. To get them there, you need something for the feed: Reels, Shorts, TikTok. Fifteen seconds, a story, faces, a joke. A solo developer can't shoot that with actors on a real range, so I had it generated.
This was the second attempt. The first ad, "Hands full", ran on a local video model on my second Mac: no voices, almost no faces. It taught me the main lesson about hooks (more on that below). For "The Legend" I switched to a cloud model that can hold characters, dialogue and sound.
An ad needs one promise, not a feature list. For a shooter's logbook, Claude put it like this: "Even legends miss. The difference is they know exactly where." The end card squeezes it into three words: KNOW YOUR MISS.
The camera style was mine: someone else's ad I liked. A field at golden hour, two armchairs and a side table in the grass, Wes Anderson symmetry, warm film grain, a cut every 2–3 seconds, snap zooms, whip pans, macro inserts. We cut three short silent clips from it and used them as camera-motion references only. The model was told not to copy the people, the props or the story, just the way the camera moves.
Two characters carry the story: The Legend: a fictional champion with fiery red hair, amber shooting glasses pushed up on her head, an olive vest, a dry half-smile and slow, precise movements. The Rookie: a jittery newcomer in a brand-new orange vest with the price tag still on the sleeve. He asks the question the viewer would ask.
He asks "How do you never miss?" She says "I do. I log them." and slides her phone with the stats toward him. Then she solemnly sips tea from a tartan thermos, walks to the station and smokes the clay. The tweed crowd erupts. The myth of the flawless shooter breaks, and the product shows up as evidence in her hand, not as a slide.
The most interesting part of the project is how the roles split. Two agents and one video model did the work, and each had its own job, just like on a real set.
| Role on set | Who | What they did | |---|---|---| | Showrunner | Me | Brought the style reference, approved the plan and the heroine, accepted the draft, lifted the "no gun on screen" rule, picked a silhouette over a face for the shot, decided to upscale to 1080p in the edit, made the calls at every fork | | Screenwriter | Claude | The promise, a four-part beat sheet, a six-shot storyboard, dialogue timing at 2.5 English words per second, a retention pass | | Fact-checker | Claude | Checked every line and every screen against the app's code and real screenshots. Cut a feature that didn't exist | | Character artist | Codex | Character sheets: the heroine full-length, from behind and as a portrait (two versions), the rookie. The model uses them to keep faces consistent shot to shot | | Production designer | Codex | The location start frame: armchairs, table, thermos, crowd behind a rope, a phone with a bright green screen to replace later | | Director | Claude | A brief for six cuts pinned to timecodes, the 180-degree rule, camera-motion references, a list of restrictions | | Camera, cast, sound | Seedance 2.5 | Shot every cut in one pass, played both leads and the crowd, voiced the lines, the range noise and the shots | | Production coordinator | Claude | Launched the generation, watched the queue, saved the IDs of every piece so we could come back to them | | Editor and sound | Claude | Edit decision list, cuts, subtitles, the KNOW YOUR MISS card, an App Store end card, the 1080×1920 upscale, frame-by-frame screen fixes, a real gunshot layered over the generated one | | Censor | Claude | Caught what ad platforms reject: barrels pointing at the camera, revealing angles |
Notice that Claude has the most roles but none of them involve drawing. It writes, counts, checks, briefs and edits. Codex and Seedance make the pictures; Claude writes their briefs and signs off on the result.
In the first draft, the Legend answered dryly: "I do. Station four." Nice line. But Claude checked it against the app's code first and found per-station stats only in the competition schedule. You can't show a screen that doesn't exist in an ad, so the line became "I do. I log them.", and the phone got a real screen with a best series of 22/25.
The next day it turned out per-station stats do exist: a By station screen shipped in a newer version that lives in a different repository. Station 7 is red on it, 50%, which is KNOW YOUR MISS in a single picture. The second version of the ad shows exactly that screen.
The lesson goes back to the first ad. Its hook was that a gloved finger can't tap a phone screen, while the watch crown still works. I rejected the shots: on the range people wear thin shooting gloves, and those work with touchscreens just fine. The hook was false for the very audience it targeted. The rule since then: check everyday details against real life and features against the code, both before generating, not after.
A video model doesn't remember what a character looked like in the previous shot. To make the red-haired Legend in cut one the same person as in cut six, you feed it a character sheet: full-length, from behind, and a portrait. Codex drew those.
I approved the heroine on the second try, and the rule was strict: the look gets approved before any video runs. Redrawing a picture takes a minute; reshooting an ad because the face is wrong takes hours.
Claude also set boundaries for the character: striking, but not sexualized. No body-focused angles, no cleavage, no bare skin. The charisma comes from light, gaze and that half-smile. The reason is practical: ad platforms reject such creatives, and the video model simply refuses those prompts. Other restrictions: no real people or athlete lookalikes, no logos. Even the thermos is unbranded, just tartan.
| # | Time | On screen | Why | |---|---|---|---| | 1 | 0–2.5 s | An orange clay bursts in slow motion. The crowd turns heads in unison. Caption: "She hasn't missed all day." | Hook: everyone is looking the wrong way | | 2 | 2.5–5 s | Whip pan to the armchairs, over the rookie's shoulder: "How do you never miss?" Snap zoom on her: "I do." | Character clash and the viewer's question | | 3 | 5–7 s | Macro: her hand slides the phone, per-station stats on screen. Voice-over: "I log them." | The product as evidence, not a slide | | 4 | 7–10 s | She pours tea from the thermos and takes a solemn sip. The rookie, out of focus: "...tea?" | The most shareable beat, a pause before the shot | | 5 | 10–12.5 s | Silence, a silhouette at the station against the sunrise, "Pull!", the shot, the clay turns to dust | The hook's promise is paid off | | 6 | 12.5–15 s | Perfect symmetry: she raises the thermos cap like a toast, the rookie copies her with an empty hand. KNOW YOUR MISS | Finale and one line of promise |