Niche examples

Six worked examples showing the full brief → outline → key script moments → footage path for different niches. Use these as templates, not transcripts, swap your topic into the same shape and the result usually lands.

Example 1: history (WWII theatre)

Channel context. Established WWII-focused channel, 12-minute workhorse runtime, sober documentary tone.

Brief:

The Vercors plateau resistance, July 1944. Document the four-week period from the maquis declaration of the "Free Republic of Vercors" through the German Operation Bettina that crushed it. Focus on the strategic miscalculation by Free French command in London that left 4,000 maquisards without the heavy-weapons drop they were promised. Sober documentary tone, slightly journalistic, in the BBC4 register. Don't speculate about the maquis's personal motivations; focus on the operational and political story. Include the 21 July 1944 German parachute landing as a fixed beat near the climax.

Outline shape Claude produces: 8 scenes for 12 minutes.

1. Hook: the moment Operation Bettina launched, July 21 (in media res).
2. Backdrop: who the maquis were, what Vercors meant geographically.
3. The Free Republic declaration, July 3.
4. The political miscalculation: London's promised heavy-weapons drop, what actually came.
5. German preparation: ground forces, the Luftwaffe parachute battalion.
6. The first three days of Bettina: tactical detail.
7. The collapse: surrender, executions, civilian reprisals.
8. Payoff: the strategic question that lingers (was it a planned sacrifice?).

Key script moments: scene 4's letter from Romans-Petit to London is a fixed beat; scene 8 closes with the editorial position the brief named.

Footage: archival tier (NARA, British Pathé, French INA where available, Wikimedia Commons for maps). Vision evaluator's pickings lean toward period-correct uniforms + geographic detail of the plateau.

Example 2: true crime (institutional failure case)

Channel context. Mid-sized true-crime channel, 20-minute runtime, gravitas-without-sensationalism tone.

Brief:

The Stafford Hospital scandal, 2005-2009. Frame as a story of institutional incentive failure: how target-culture in NHS trusts produced documented patient harm. True-crime gravitas tone, no sensationalism. Stay within the Francis Inquiry's findings; do not speculate about individual culpability beyond what the inquiry established. Include the 1,200 excess-deaths estimate but contextualise it (it's not a confirmed death toll, it's a statistical excess). Don't lead with shock figures.

Outline shape: 13 scenes for 20 minutes.

1. Hook: a specific patient case from the inquiry record (consented use only, or composite).
2. Backdrop: NHS Foundation Trust status, what targets it had to hit.
3. The 2005 mortality signal that should have triggered review.
4. Why it didn't: the regulatory structure.
5. Cynthia Bower's tenure at the Healthcare Commission.
6. The 2009 inquiry: what was found.
7. The 1,200-excess-deaths estimate: where it came from, what it does and doesn't mean.
8. Francis Inquiry I (2010) findings.
9. Francis Inquiry II (2013) recommendations.
10. The institutional response: duty of candour, the CQC reforms.
11. What's improved.
12. What hasn't.
13. Payoff: the framework question for ongoing audit failure modes.

Key script moments: scene 7 walks carefully through statistical excess vs confirmed deaths. The brief's "stay within Francis Inquiry findings" constraint gets enforced as a critic blocker if the script drifts.

Footage: mixed sources. Some NHS-released footage (Crown copyright, usable with attribution), inquiry-press archive, neutral institutional shots (hospital exteriors, NHS regulatory bodies). Vision evaluator filters out anything that looks tabloid-style.

Example 3: science (atmospheric science explainer)

Channel context. Newer science-explainer channel, 8-minute runtime, conversational explainer tone.

Brief:

The Bodélé Depression in Chad is the world's largest single dust source; 27 percent of all Saharan dust comes from this one place. That dust is the dominant fertiliser for the Amazon rainforest 5,000 miles away. Explain the meteorology that drives the dust storms, the satellite-tracking evidence that established the connection, and what climate-modelling suggests about how this might change. Explainer tone, conversational but never flippant, in the Wendover register. Don't overclaim: name the correlational structure when causal mechanism is uncertain.

Outline shape: 7 scenes for 8 minutes.

1. Hook: the question, framed as the surprising fact (dust from a dry lake fertilises a rainforest).
2. The geography: where Bodélé is, what it is.
3. The meteorology: how Saharan dust storms form.
4. The Atlantic transport mechanism.
5. The Amazon side: phosphorus uptake, the limiting nutrient.
6. The evidence: satellite tracking, isotope analysis.
7. Payoff: what climate models suggest about the next 50 years, with the uncertainty named explicitly.

Key script moments: scene 7 follows the brief's "don't overclaim" constraint, naming model uncertainty rather than asserting predictions.

Footage: NASA Image and Video Library is the lead (Earth observation satellite footage), Wikimedia for geographic + diagram imagery, NASA EOS time-lapses of dust crossing the Atlantic. The science niche's prompting fragment enforces the citation-style mentions in the script.

Example 4: finance (case-study format)

Channel context. Finance channel, 12-minute runtime, sober reporting tone.

Brief:

Wirecard's collapse, June 2020. Frame as a story of audit failure: how EY (Ernst & Young) signed off Wirecard's accounts for 10 years before €1.9bn was found to be entirely missing. Focus on the specific audit procedures that should have caught it and didn't. Sober finance-reporting tone, no investment advice. Don't speculate about individual auditor knowledge or intent; stay within what the BaFin and German parliamentary inquiry established. Don't editorialise about the post-collapse share price or any subsequent investments.

Outline shape: 8 scenes for 12 minutes.

1. Hook: the June 18 2020 announcement that €1.9bn could not be located.
2. Backdrop: what Wirecard was, what it claimed to be.
3. The 10-year EY audit relationship.
4. The 2019 Financial Times investigation.
5. The KPMG special audit.
6. The June 2020 disclosure.
7. What the German inquiry established about audit procedures.
8. Payoff: the structural audit-incentive problem that makes this hard to prevent.

Key script moments: scene 5's KPMG special audit details are the substantive heart; the brief's "no investment advice" constraint excludes any forward-looking claims.

Footage: tech-finance hybrid, broad Pexels + Pixabay for generic finance imagery, Wikimedia for corporate logos and exec photos, some archival broadcast news footage with attribution.

Example 5: literary analysis (close-reading format)

Channel context. Niche literary channel, 30-minute deep-dive runtime, cultured/considered tone.

Brief:

Argue that the Inspector Goole character in J.B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls is a deliberate dramatisation of the post-war Beveridge Report's moral architecture: the play is the Beveridge plan dressed as theatre. Long-form analytical tone, suitable for a 30-minute close reading. Quote the Beveridge Report directly at least twice. Don't simplify Priestley's politics; he wasn't a straightforward Labour partisan. Open with a specific line from the play (Goole's "We are members of one body" speech).

Outline shape: 18 scenes for 30 minutes.

1. Hook: the Goole speech (verbatim, the brief's fixed beat).
2. The play in one minute: situation, the inspector's arrival.
3. Beveridge in one minute: the 1942 report, the five giants.
4. The Five Giants in the play, scene by scene.
5. Want: Eva Smith's economic precariousness, scene 1.
6. Disease: the health-and-housing references, scene 2.
7. Ignorance: education-and-class references.
8. Squalor: housing imagery.
9. Idleness: employment ethics.
10. The Birling family as the pre-Beveridge order.
11. Eric Birling as the transitional figure.
12. Goole as Beveridge anthropomorphised.
13. The political ambiguity: Priestley vs Beveridge's specific proposals.
14. The "we are members of one body" frame in detail.
15. The 1945 election context.
16. The Christian socialism strand (Priestley's, not Beveridge's).
17. The morality-play structure: Goole as both judge and gospel.
18. Payoff: what the conjunction tells us about how moral architecture becomes theatre.

Key script moments: scene 1 is the brief's fixed beat (Goole speech verbatim). Scene 13 navigates the editorial position the brief named: Priestley is more complicated than "Labour playwright". Scene 18 closes with the editorial argument.

Footage: classical/literary visual sources, period theatre photography, Beveridge Report cover scans (UK National Archives), 1945-election footage from Pathé. The classical niche's prompting fragment enforces close-reading conventions.

Example 6: business (founders-and-misjudgement format)

Channel context. Business-history channel, 12-minute runtime, sober commentary tone.

Brief:

The Quibi launch and 6-month collapse, April-October 2020. Frame as a story of product-market misjudgement: how Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman raised $1.75 billion and built a mobile-first short-form video platform that no one wanted, on the threshold of TikTok's takeover. Sober commentary tone, not gloating. Focus on the specific bet they made (premium short-form for commuters) and how the world changed underneath them (COVID, commuter mobility collapse, TikTok). Don't say "they should have seen it coming"; that's hindsight bias. Frame the bet's plausibility at the time, then the specific factors that broke it.

Outline shape: 8 scenes for 12 minutes.

1. Hook: October 21 2020 shutdown announcement (in media res).
2. The 2018 bet: what Katzenberg and Whitman thought they saw.
3. The product: 5-to-10-minute premium-production episodes.
4. The infrastructure investment.
5. April 2020 launch: COVID, no commuters, no use case.
6. What was wrong from day one: the no-share constraint.
7. What was wrong from day 60: TikTok's takeover of the same demographic.
8. Payoff: the framework question for venture-scale bets on specific assumed user behaviours.

Key script moments: scene 2 frames the bet's plausibility in 2018 terms (not 2020 terms) per the brief's anti-hindsight constraint.

Footage: business-news archive footage, Quibi promotional clips (fair-use commentary), Pexels stock for generic phone/commuter imagery, Wikimedia for company logos.

What's next

Prompting in depth for the advanced brief-writing playbook these examples draw from.

Building profitable channels covers the channel-economics frame these niches sit inside.

Brief writing strategy for the basics.

Cheers,
Carl