How to make a documentary about a real event without inventing footage
Tell Vizard Agent that the story is real and that nothing may look like documentation of it. Generated scenes of a named person's last day are convincing, undated and false; illustrative footage of a suburb, a bicycle or an emergency alert carries the story without pretending to be a record of it.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Say "illustrative" out loud. Without it, a documentary brief gets the most vivid possible images, and vivid in this genre means a generated child on a generated street, which is exactly what you cannot publish. Name the case so Vizard Agent can verify it, and ask for every date, name and figure to be checked.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
True-crime and historical documentaries are made out of other people's worst days. The line that matters is between a picture that illustrates a point and one a viewer could mistake for evidence. Vizard Agent searches for footage that illustrates each section, never for a depiction of the event, and verifies the facts before choosing the visuals. In the session behind this article it:
- Checked the lengths and formats of eleven supplied voiceover files and extracted the spoken content to map the visual beats against it.
- Diagnosed the one audio file that would not decode, rather than dropping it.
- Worked out what the requested style referred to, checked options for maps, timelines and alert interfaces, and chose a historically responsible treatment for generated stills.
- Sourced clearly illustrative stock: a child's bike ride, suburban atmosphere, search and response, emergency alerts, roads and signs.
- Checked authoritative historical sources for the timeline and facts, and looked for a trustworthy, publicly usable archive image of the person, if one existed.
- Verified the official terminology for the on-screen text, and checked the recovery statistic before deciding whether to include it at all.
When does this not work well?
Some stories should not be made this way. If the only way to tell it is to show what happened, if the family has asked for privacy, or if the facts are genuinely disputed, an illustrated documentary becomes a dramatisation with a documentary's authority. Very recent cases are still moving, identifiable private people did not choose this, and restricted court or police images cannot be used.
Common questions
What about generated images? Vizard Agent uses them for atmosphere and diagrams, never to depict real people or events.
What if a fact cannot be verified? Vizard Agent flags it so you can drop it or soften the claim.
Should the video say what is illustrative? Yes. A line on screen costs nothing, and Vizard Agent will add it.