Brief writing strategy

The brief is the single biggest lever on script quality. Everything downstream, outline, script, voice, footage choice, even thumbnail framing, reads from it. This page is the practitioner's guide to writing one that lands.

The three pillars

A brief Claude can do its best work with carries three things: topic, angle, and tone. Constraints are a fourth bonus pillar when you have them.

Topic + angle

Not just "the Berlin Wall" but "the Berlin Wall through the lens of one family that was split between East and West for twenty-eight years."

The narrower the angle, the better the script. AI documentary lives or dies on angle. A generic topic gives Claude no purchase, and you get a Wikipedia-voice summary. A narrow angle gives Claude a thread to follow and the script structures itself around it.

Bad: "The history of penicillin." Better: "How penicillin moved from a contaminated petri dish in 1928 to a battlefield drug by 1944, through the lens of Howard Florey's Oxford team." Best: "Howard Florey's Oxford team, the unsung group who turned Fleming's accidental discovery into a battlefield drug by 1944. Why their contribution gets dropped from most retellings."

The third version implies the angle without naming it (the credit-distribution injustice) and gives the script an editorial position to argue from. Editorial positions make watchable documentary.

Tone

Two or three adjectives. The voice picker and the script generator both read this.

Good tones: "Sober documentary, slightly journalistic." "Energetic explainer, conversational but never flippant." "Deadpan commentary, dry humour." "True-crime gravitas, no sensationalism."

Bad tones: "Engaging." "Interesting." "Educational." Vague modifiers tell Claude nothing concrete. Replace them with a specific reference point: "in the voice of a BBC documentary narrator", "like the Wendover Productions style of explainer", "the tone of the Last Podcast on the Left but without the jokes".

Constraints

Anything that has to be in the video, anything that has to NOT be. Constraints are how you steer Claude away from the failure modes you've already seen.

"Don't speculate about motive, only sourced facts." "Include the 1989 Tear Down This Wall speech as a fixed beat near the end." "No music for the first 30 seconds, cold open." "Don't mention any living people by name." "Open with the line 'It was a Tuesday.' Do not paraphrase."

The script generator treats constraints as directives Claude must satisfy, not optional suggestions. The outline regen with a hint preserves them.

Writing the brief

The brief field on the form is one to three sentences. More than that and you're writing the script yourself; less than that and Claude has nothing to anchor on.

Three-sentence template that works for most niches:

1. The topic + the angle (one sentence).
2. The tone + the reference point (one sentence).
3. Any hard constraints (one sentence).

Example, for a history-niche brief:

The Bletchley Park codebreakers and how Turing's bombe machine actually worked, told through the perspective of one specific decryption (the German naval Enigma breakthrough in May 1941). Sober documentary tone, slightly journalistic, in the BBC4 register. Don't speculate about Turing's personal life; focus on the technical and operational story.

That's a brief Claude can land.

When you draw a blank

The brief form has a Help me write this affordance, it opens a coach dialog with worked examples for the niche you've picked, a step-by-step builder that walks you through topic-angle-tone-constraint, and a "Polish what I've written" button that runs your draft through Claude with a humanise pass to strip AI-tells and tighten the angle.

The coach is most useful when you have a topic but no angle. The dialog suggests three candidate angles, you pick one, and the brief assembles itself around it.

How the brief gets used downstream

The brief reads at multiple stages:

• Outline. Claude generates the scene-by-scene outline directly from the brief. This is where angle and tone matter most.
• Script. Each scene's script generator re-reads the brief + the outline so the per-scene voice stays consistent with the brief's tone.
• Critic. The script critic compares each scene against the brief's constraints + the niche's anti-patterns. Constraints you write explicitly get enforced as blockers.
• Voice picker. The recommender ranks voices for niche fit AND tone match. A "sober documentary" brief biases toward graver voices; "energetic explainer" biases toward higher-energy voices.
• Footage routing. The orchestrator reads the brief for hints like "archival sources only" or "high-quality colour stock" and routes the chain accordingly.

A brief that does all four pillars well sets you up for a video that needs little intervention.

Common failure modes

The topic-only brief. "Tell me about the moon landing." No angle, no tone, no constraints. The script reads like an encyclopedia entry and the voice picker has nothing to bias on.

The over-specified brief. Six paragraphs of detailed scene-by-scene direction. Claude treats this as a Custom Script (see Custom script) and you've done the work yourself.

The contradicting brief. "Sober tone, but also fun and energetic, in the style of MrBeast meets David Attenborough." The script generator picks one and the result reads inconsistent. Pick one tone.

The empty constraints. "Make it good." Specify what "good" means for you. "Quote primary sources where possible." "Don't editorialise beyond what's in the historical record." Concrete is testable; vague is not.

What's next

Format and length covers picking the format chip and the length rung.

Niche selection covers picking the niche, which informs how the brief gets interpreted.

Custom script is the path if you'd rather write the script yourself.

Cheers,
Carl