What Went Well
- Creative Alignment: The team (Jules, DP, Margaux) unified quickly on the “Objectness” mandate, creating a cohesive mockumentary tone that leveraged AI’s strengths rather than fighting its weaknesses.
- Lip-Sync Waiver: Successfully secured a waiver for the native audio directive, preserving high-quality custom TTS performances and artistic intent for inanimate characters.
- Pacing Recovery: Enforced strict runtime mandates early (Step 2), preventing a failure to meet the 3-minute floor in the final cut.
- Technical Resilience: Managed multiple agent stalls and crashes (kappa-techlead, kappa-editor, kappa-idea) without losing project state or momentum.
What Didn’t Go Well
- Model Bias Struggle: combating the AI’s tendency to anthropomorphize “Clippy” required three rounds of regens and aggressive negative prompting, which delayed Step 4.
- Infrastructure Friction: Jules (kappa-idea) was unable to spin up a continuity-checker sub-agent due to broker issues, forcing a pivot to manual visual review.
- Polling Loops: I initially fell into an unproductive file-polling loop during Step 4 while waiting for a large batch of images; corrected this by switching to a ‘blocked’ status protocol.
Failure Modes & Bottlenecks
- Agent Crashes: Every team agent crashed or stalled at least once, requiring active monitoring and resumption.
- Storyboard Scale: Generating 56 unique keyframes is a significant bottleneck in the 7-step pipeline; parallel batch processing by the DP was essential but still time-consuming.
Key Decisions Made
- Rejected Veo Native Audio: Decided to revert the audio strategy pivot despite the coordinator directive because our characters literally have no lips; this preserved the character voices (Fenrir/Puck).
- Enforced 15s Extensions: Refused to clear Step 5 with 8s clips, requiring the DP to execute extensions to meet the Editor’s comedic pacing requirements.
- Accepted Minor Defect (Shot 10c): Allowed a generic paperclip shape in a 5-second b-roll shot to maintain production momentum, avoiding a fourth regen cycle for diminishing returns.
Suggestions for Improvement
- Anatomy-Aware Directives: The lip-sync directive should explicitly exempt inanimate/mouthless characters to avoid unnecessary pivot/reversion friction.
- Storyboard Directory Standardization: DP used /storyboard/ while I expected /storyboards/; standardize this path in the playbook.
- Wait-for-Batch protocol: Tooling to notify the Coach only when a full batch (e.g. 56 frames) is complete would eliminate polling overhead.