A history channel,
and you are never on camera.
Paste a link to the thing you want to cover, or type the brief, and get back a narrated documentary short with a cold open and three acts. You choose the period it looks like: sepia archival, scratched 16mm, dim reenactment, saturated postwar colour.
- You bring
- A link, or a brief
- You get
- A narrated short with a shape
- Runs
- 7 to 8 minutes, or as short as you like
This is for you if
You read about one thing constantly and could talk about it for eight minutes, and the reason you have not started a channel is that you do not want your face on the internet.
What it will not do
The archival photographs are not archival. They are generated to look like a 1930s print or a scratched reel, and they are convincing, which is exactly the problem: a picture that reads as a document is not a document. Do not present one as evidence of anything, and say on the channel that the imagery is generated. If your subject genuinely needs the real photograph of the real person, this is the wrong tool for that shot and a public archive is the right one.
You bring one thing.
You get the rest.
A link, or a brief
Point us at a page about the subject and we read it, or type what you want covered and how you want it argued. Either way you are giving it the thing you already know; you are not writing seven minutes of narration tonight.
A narrated short with a shape
Not a slideshow with a voice over it. A cold open, three acts and a coda, each scene in one consistent period look, narrated at documentary pace, with a score composed underneath it: an instrumental bed built to sit under a voice, a tension cue, and a closing swell. Written for this video rather than picked off a library.
5 steps,
and you can stop
at any of them.
Nothing renders until you have read the script and looked at the shots. If it is going wrong you find out before you have paid for it.
- 01
Give it the subject
A link to a page about it, or a written brief in your own words. The brief is where your angle goes: the same subject argued two ways is two different films.
- 02
Choose the shape
Micro-doc opens cold, runs three acts and lands on a coda, at about seven minutes. Educational Lesson is the other one: three concepts, worked examples and a recap, at about eight.
- 03
Choose the period
Sepia archival stills with the slow push. Scratched 16mm found footage. The dim stylised reenactment, or the locked interview looking straight down the lens. Pick one and hold it, because a documentary that changes stock every scene reads as a mistake.
- 04
Read the scenes before they render
You see the scene breakdown first. A scene that is wrong gets sent back with a note about what to change, and comes back rewritten, rather than you rewriting it.
- 05
Narration, score, captions, render
The narration carries prosody tags inline, so the read has pauses and shifts in it rather than being flat. The score goes underneath and stays under. Captions are burned in. Wide for a television, vertical for a phone.
Creator covers the full look catalogue, both long formats and unwatermarked renders. A seven minute film costs more to make than a sixty second one because there is more of it, which is a length question rather than a tier question.
See what that is →The ones
people ask.
- 01
Do I have to write the script?
No. You give it the subject and the angle, as a link or as a brief, and it writes the narration to the shape you picked. What you should still do is read it before it renders, because you know the subject and it does not.
- 02
Where do the pictures come from?
They are generated for your scenes in the look you chose, not pulled from a stock library and not pulled from an archive. That is why they match each other, and it is also why they are not evidence. Say so on your channel.
- 03
Is the music licensed?
It is composed for your video, in three parts: a long instrumental bed that is built to sit under a voice without competing, a tension cue for the turn, and a short closing swell. No vocals in any of them, because the bed is written to be under narration. Nothing is pulled off a library, so there is nothing to clear.
- 04
Can I do true crime with this?
The looks are there for it, including the stylised reenactment and the locked interview framing. The judgement is yours: real cases involve real people who are alive, and a generated reenactment of a real crime is a thing to think hard about before publishing, not after.
- 05
Will it look like every other faceless channel?
That depends on you, honestly. The generic version of this is a stock photo slideshow with a synthetic voice, and it looks generic because nobody chose anything. Choosing one period and holding it for the whole film is most of the difference, and the catalogue is deep enough that your 1850s tintype channel and someone else's postwar Kodachrome channel are not the same channel.
- 06
Can I run it as a series?
Yes. A channel holds the format, the look, the voice and the cast, so episode nine starts already looking like episode one instead of being set up again from scratch.
02 · CHARACTERSOne character, every video
The same face in every episode, checked rather than hoped for.
See how it works →
04 · WEEKLYFaceless weekly
The same channel, on a schedule you can keep.
See how it works →
07 · TEACHINGCourse videos
The lesson format, taught rather than narrated.
See how it works →