Exaggerated history

Make an exaggerated-history reel: a funny found tape from the past, in the time and place below, where people use today's technology as if it were completely normal. Nobody in the film finds it strange: that is the joke. Work out one small story a stranger can say in one sentence: an ordinary work problem, someone important hears about it, and one absurd fix with today's technology that pays off in a picture. Make about 4 scenes in one line of time, and not every scene is someone talking. Write spoken lines the way a person says them on a dull work call: short, dry and plain, never explaining the joke. Make each scene's opening picture with generate_image, vertical, filling the whole frame with no black bars and no text, each with an earlier picture or frame as a reference so the place, the people and the light stay the same. Keep the main person large in the frame. What the payoff changes must look missing, broken or unfinished in the first picture, so the setup and the payoff agree. Read builtin-handheld-footage, and make each scene with generate_video at high quality, 6 seconds, sound on, from its picture, with the camera words first and any spoken line in double quotes in that same prompt, so the voice and the mouth come from one pass. Never use generated speech with lip sync here. Read each clip's transcript and cut inside its pauses, with room after the last word. Watch each clip for camera motion: a dark or seated shot can come back steady, so tell me in one line when one does. Where the story moves to another place, join the two scenes with generate_video, generateAudio false, startFrame at the frame where the film cuts out of the first and endFrame at the first frame of the next, prompted as one continuous handheld move through what connects them. Mute it, cut to the part that moves and speed it to about 2 seconds: on a sped-up clip, duration counts source seconds. A shot framed tighter than its join needs scale keys on the join so the two meet. Cut hard into the payoff scene. Give every shot one grade and put a VHS region over the whole film, whatever the era: the wrong camera is part of the joke. Add a big camera stamp in VT323 with PLAY and an impossible date from that era, and keep the captions of the spoken words small in the same font. Make one original song, 60 seconds, instrumental unless the place calls for a chant, with a strong beat and instruments of that place, and a big drop: a real track someone would put on, never comic and never cheap-sounding. It plays from the first frame to the last. Read its measured hits and slide its offset so the biggest drop lands on the film's biggest moment. Lower it to about a third with volume keys under each spoken line, and make sure no music a generated clip made for itself plays over it. Keep low wind or room sound under shots with no speech. From search_stock, add one whoosh on each join, one deep impact on the payoff and one tape glitch on the end. End by pausing the tape: hold the last frame with a slow push, change the stamp to PAUSE, take the date away, darken the top of the frame, and above the VHS layer put my brand below, big and sharp, under a small line above it, in the same font with a soft glow, and clear of the face. With no brand, end on the last line.