How to build a six-minute documentary from one interview
Upload the interview and tell Vizard Agent you want a six-minute film. Vizard Agent transcribes it word by word, shot-logs every visual it contains, mines your earlier films for footage worth reusing, pulls exact timings for every line it plans to use, and builds a documentary around the voice.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Say the tone in the negative as well as the positive. "Cinematic documentary, not promotional" tells Vizard Agent more about the film you want than any list of adjectives, because it rules out the register this kind of piece most often collapses into. Point it at your earlier films too, so your back catalogue becomes the b-roll library.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
One person talking for forty minutes contains a six-minute film, but only if you can see everything they said at once, so the selection is made from the text. An interview gives a voice and one angle; the films you've already made give the pictures. In the session behind this article it:
- Checked the project history, downloaded the interview and transcribed the testimonial word by word.
- Scanned every shot in the footage, reviewed sample frames across the whole recording and read the visual shot log of the entire interview.
- Condensed the transcript into readable paragraphs and read all of it through.
- Checked the organisation's earlier films for reusable footage and sampled frames from them.
- Grabbed full-size frames to plan the widescreen reframe, then pulled exact word timings for every line it planned to use.
- Delivered a 1920x1080 film at 23.976fps, five minutes and forty-eight seconds long.
When does this not work well?
A six-minute film asks a lot of a single interview, and some of it can't be supplied afterwards by Vizard Agent or anyone else. A thin interview stays thin, and without an archive one angle for six minutes is hard to watch. A widescreen crop from vertical source loses resolution, and consent for an interview given for one film may not cover another.
Common questions
How long an interview do I need? Long enough to contain six minutes of substance. Vizard Agent worked from around forty minutes here.
Can Vizard Agent use my older videos? Yes, and it should. It sampled the earlier films for reusable footage on this run.
Will it feel like an advertisement? Not if you say it should not. Vizard Agent selects quite differently when the tone rules that out.