How to illustrate a figure of speech without taking it literally
Tell Vizard Agent which lines are figures of speech. Footage is chosen from what a sentence says, and a metaphor says something it does not mean. So it looks for abstract material that carries the feeling, such as smoke rather than a burning house, and checks that the shot is not quietly asserting something the script never claimed.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Mark the lines for Vizard Agent and say what each one actually means. "Make it less literal" is not enough on its own. The useful instruction names the specific line and gives the feeling behind it, because the feeling is what a shot has to carry. Borderline phrases are decided by what you meant.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
Footage gets searched for what a line means, not for its nouns, so the search terms change completely once a line is understood as figurative. A literal shot makes a claim: a burning house on screen says a house burned. That matters most in a factual piece. In the sessions behind this article it:
- Read the narration line by line and checked the context around ambiguous phrases, which is how a line about a real fire is told apart from a line about a bad quarter.
- Searched for abstract material wherever a line was not literal, choosing footage whose movement and light matched the weight of the line rather than footage containing the noun.
- Ran each shot under the whole line instead of cutting on the metaphor's key word, which would point at it and make the literalism obvious.
- Checked that no shot asserted anything the script did not.
- Showed the user what it picked before assembling, replacing anything that read as literal.
When does this not work well?
Abstraction has a cost. Too much of it and the video stops being about anything, and some registers, such as instructional, technical and news, expect the picture to show the thing being described and read abstract footage as evasive. Very literal scripts leave nothing to interpret, and idioms may not survive translation at all.
Common questions
Can it tell a metaphor by itself? Often, and Vizard Agent reads the surrounding context when it is unsure.
Will it change my script? No. Vizard Agent changes what is on screen, not what is said.
What if a literal shot is funny on purpose? Then say so, and Vizard Agent will lean into it.