How this video was made

Why we're called Serious People

We believe that to do genuinely serious work, you can't take yourself too seriously. The best operators we know hold both: real rigor about the work, and zero precious-ness about themselves. We want to work with people who feel the same way.

So "Serious People" — say it with a straight face and a raised eyebrow — is meant to be a homing beacon for clients and coworkers with a sense of humor and humility. We wanted it to be the first thing you know about us.

We hired Claude as our creative director

We started with Claude Design playing the role of creative director. Here was our first prompt:

Serious People is meant to be a brand targeting mostly small to medium businesses and some larger businesses that is a bit cheeky about its personality. It conveys its seriousness by saying it in the name, thereby implying that it's not. Think a kid in grown-up's clothes or someone going out of their way to look the part of a businessman. It's a fine balance to convey serious but not actually serious, and I need your help defining that look. One source of inspiration is the TBPN promo real from its early days. I imagine things like 80s power suits, people striking business poses, exaggerated briefcase carrying, sending faxes, etc.

Claude instantly understood what we were going for: deadpan, clipped, written like an internal memo, pulling from the register of Amazon leadership principles, 1999 annual reports, legal disclaimers, and Bloomberg terminal headers. And then it fucking nailed it:

Claude had more to say on visual treatments, offering a monochrome Xerox grade for documents and props, and a warm, desaturated Tan grade for people and rooms. Monochrome wasn't funny. Desaturated tan was very funny.

Xerox · mono

Tan · warm

Then, casting. Six recurring characters, each defined not by a face but by a suit, a signature prop, and a tell. We don't mind if the generators drift on faces — it helps land the joke if the image is ever so slightly off — so we let it happen.

Noah

Principal

Hand on hip when he's thinking.

Marlene

Managing Director

Reading glasses on a chain.

Del

Senior Associate

Sleeves rolled by end of day.

Yuki

Head of Research

Never without a printout.

Boyd

SVP, Operations

An unlit cigar he never lights.

Priya

Analyst

Carries the coffee for everyone.

Before our big film shoot, we needed a shot list. Claude Design broke it down scene by scene, interspersing stock footage and scripted gags, laid out a plan for the edit, all decided before a single frame existed. Gags are rationed three-to-one against everything else, because we are a business after all, not a sketch show.

Mistakes

We solved this by starting with a text-to-image prompt, refining the image until we loved it, and then using it as a keyframe to prompt a video. Text-to-image-to-video beat text-to-video on every shot we compared. It also gave us a chance to fine-tune more cheaply and more quickly with still images before spending the big bucks on video.

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Still · gpt-image-1

Motion · Runway

Using images to prompt video

Each approved still is fed to Runway as its first frame, with a prompt describing only the movement: a slow handheld drift, a sip, a hand writing on a whiteboard. Runway's minimum length is five seconds, so everything is generated longer than we need and trimmed later. Even with the image prompting trick, things still got weird sometimes.

Eventually, we had a folder on our Mac with a pile of approved clips, some of which were very, very funny.

Fifteen clips, two formats, one grade

Lastly, editing. Claude Code watched all 15 clips, found the right start and stop points, came up with a pacing that it thought was very varied and interesting, and wrote down its detailed cut instructions in Markdown. Then it picked up FFmpeg and started editing — trimming, concatenating, and re-encoding to a uniform codec. The color grade isn't a CSS filter on the website; it's baked into the file here, so it can never drift between browsers. Mobile gets a dedicated 9:16 cut, with each shot hand-cropped to protect the gag.

The cutting-room floor

The reel is fifteen shots. We generated far more than that. Some gags were funnier on paper than the model could render; some fought physics and lost. They're worth showing, because the editing is the craft — knowing what to throw away is most of the job.

dr-01 · cut

dt-04 · cut

ph-06 · cut

Now that it works, it's a skill

The first time through, the pipeline was a working session and a lot of trial and error. So we turned it into a tool. The whole sequence — reference images, the prompt skeleton, the grade, the approve-then-animate gate — is now two reusable commands. Generate a still to brand spec. Approve it. Animate it.

For Serious People, the cost of making custom, on-brand work is now pocket change, and we can do it again and again. The skill that built a brand film is now teed up to make our next assets. We could never have hired a film crew and actors and editing team, but we can mess around for a day and generate a whole world. That's what it means, to us, to be serious about this.

Before you ask, here's the entire production budget.