How to decide what gets real footage and what gets a diagram
Give Vizard Agent the rule rather than the ratio. Anything the viewer needs to understand, such as a mechanism, a figure or a flow, becomes a motion graphic. Anything they need to believe, such as a place, a person or a piece of evidence, stays as real footage. The split is decided on the script before a single asset is made.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Give Vizard Agent the rule and the prohibition together in one brief. The rule decides what each line becomes. The prohibition on reuse is what stops the film sliding back into a slideshow later, when sourcing gets difficult and repeating a shot starts to look reasonable.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
The split happens on the script itself, before any footage is chosen or any graphic generated. Once the claims and numbers are listed, the graphics are a known quantity you can count, budget and check, rather than being commissioned one at a time as the edit runs out of footage. In the session behind this article it:
- Built a clean transcript and chapter cues from a published article's source, then sampled and reviewed the source video to see what real footage existed.
- Mapped the source's claims and numbers into timecoded sections and saved the exact wording around each figure for grounding.
- Wrote the narration and the shot plan together before generating any visuals, so every line already knew what would illustrate it.
- Reviewed footage candidates by subject area and generated the unique diagrams and stat cards in parallel.
- Inspected every graphic for legibility and checked its numbers against the saved wording, then assembled the five-minute timeline, alternating footage and graphics, to the narration.
When does this not work well?
Some subjects lean entirely one way from the start. A piece about a physical place is almost all footage, a piece about a financial instrument is almost all graphics, and forcing half and half onto either makes Vizard Agent produce filler to hit the ratio. Thin footage means the rule can't be honoured, and very short pieces have too few shots.
Common questions
Why forbid reuse? Because reuse is what a film does when sourcing gets hard. Vizard Agent plans around it instead.
What if there is not enough footage? Vizard Agent says so rather than repeating shots, and you decide what gives.
Who checks the numbers on the cards? Vizard Agent, against the exact source wording it saved.