Director's Prompt
The AI Secret Sauce — directing AI video like a filmmaker
Director's Prompt: The AI Secret Sauce is Kiel's working manual on AI video — written from real brand campaigns, not theory. It teaches you to stop prompting and start directing: motion hierarchy, one dominant action, model routing, and the filter-safe workflows that get brand work through. Read the four parts free, then test yourself below.
1 · The director, not the prompter
The single reframe the whole book stands on: you are not writing wishes into a text box, you are directing a shoot. Every prompt answers the director's questions — what is the camera doing, what is the one dominant action, what does the world contribute without competing.
The motion hierarchy orders every video prompt: camera motion first, then character gesture, then secondary motion (fabric, jewellery), then environment, then VFX last. If VFX dominates, the shot is failing.
One dominant action per beat. If you cannot name what the camera is doing in one sentence, you have not finished thinking.
2 · Route the model before you write the prompt
AI video production is a routing problem, not a prompting problem. No single model is best at everything: wide cinematic motion goes to Seedance, HUD and interface graphics to Nano Banana 2, identity-locked character close-ups to Nano Banana Pro, single-shot product work to Runway.
The choice of model comes before the prompt — because it decides the prompt's structure, its character budget, and what you can trust the model to invent.
The director routes. The model executes.
3 · Rate like a producer, not a fan
Every generation is rated /100 across seven categories — composition, motion, light, material, continuity, emotion, discipline. Producer-grade is 95+ in every category, not on average; an average hides failure modes.
The lowest-scoring category is the bottleneck, and it is where the next iteration focuses. This is slower than vibes. It ships work.
Rating honestly matters more than generating quickly.
4 · Get brand work through the filters
Brand names in prompt text trigger content filters; brand identity in reference images does not. Describe what is visible — "premium dark spiced rum bottle, red-and-gold label" — and let the uploaded reference carry the brand.
Camera brands become the look they produce ("cinema look, warm film grain, halation"), national teams become kit colours, and on-screen text overlays stay filter-safe even when the words are branded. This is how real TVCs ship.
The reference image carries the brand. The prompt carries none of it.
Workbooks & resources
- Part 1 · The Director's Playbook — Core philosophy, the motion hierarchy, camera language
- Part 2 · Choosing Your Model — Seedance vs Runway vs Dreamina, compression, negative prompting
- Part 3 · Templates & Keywords — Copy-paste master templates and the keyword library
- Supplementary Study · Real Campaigns — NPF Drone Squad, Tuffy's 3100, C2C and Captain Morgan