Fortunes and Follies
An automated pipeline that turns a researched business-history story into a finished vertical short: narration, word-timed captions, illustrated scenes, five visual formats.
The need
A faceless story channel needs a video a day, and each one costs hours of narration, caption timing, art and layout. The pipeline renders one from a single story JSON, and the research tooling picks topics by what already over-performs.
What was hard
- 1
5x outlier discovery
Scans a set of channels, computes each channel's average views and surfaces the shorts running at five times that or more.
- 2
Outlier profiling
Classifies presentation, narration, captions, cut cadence and palette, and names the nearest house format.
- 3
Nine-slot story arc
A nine-slot arc is mapped onto an eight-scene structure and filled slot by slot from verified facts.
- 4
Word-level captions
Captions are timed from TTS boundary events, so there is no transcription step and no drift.
- 5
Scene template dispatch
Nine scene components and five full compositions (story, paper, dossier, terminal, blueprint) are chosen per story.
- 6
Consistent illustration style
A shared style suffix and negative prompt per story make generated plates look like one illustrator.