AI made the first draft easier. It didn’t make client decisions easier

A few years ago, the early stages of a video project often began almost from zero. We would talk through the client’s direction, work out a script, develop the visual approach and gradually turn a loose idea into something the client could react to.

That part has changed. Today, a client can give me a rough direction and I can use AI to produce a first script quickly, revise it and put something concrete back in front of them. From there, we can move into the rest of production with much less work spent creating everything from scratch.

The first draft became easier. The decision often did not.

A client may know what the video is for and still have difficulty describing what it should look or feel like.

Usually I start by asking whether there is a reference video or image close to what they have in mind. If there is, we can talk about something specific. If there is not, I will often find several examples myself and ask what feels right and what does not.

The conversation often becomes clearer at that point. One direction may feel too polished. Another looks too much like an advertisement. The pacing may work while the characters do not. Sometimes ruling something out tells us as much as choosing something.

Once the direction becomes clearer, the conversation also becomes more specific. We can move from “something like this” to decisions about the script, visual style, characters, scenes and eventually the storyboard. Each step narrows what the production side has to interpret on its own.

This is why I do not think of requirement discovery as a single conversation at the beginning of a project. In practice, it develops through a sequence of increasingly concrete choices. The earlier those choices become clear, the less likely the production team is to spend time building in the wrong direction.

Part of my job, then, is not simply to take an instruction and turn it into a video. It is to help the client arrive at the instruction in the first place.

AI helps me get something concrete in front of the client earlier. It does not remove the conversation that follows.

A different kind of uncertainty can appear later.

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I have worked on projects where the script was confirmed, the main visual direction was confirmed and the work had already reached a rough cut. From the production side, the major choices seemed settled. Then another person or department inside the client organisation reviewed the material, and earlier decisions reopened.

What looked like approval from one side of the project turned out to be one stage in a longer internal process. Only then do we discover that the decision was not actually closed.

Making another version may be straightforward. Knowing whether the people reviewing it are the people whose decision will hold can be harder.

A late change is not just another prompt or another edit. By that point, several parts of the work may already depend on the earlier decision. A changed script can affect images; changed images can affect video generation and editing; feedback then has to travel back through the people doing each part of the work.

Faster generation makes the replacement work easier. But the change still has to be passed back through the people doing the rest of the work. In some projects, that coordination takes more of my attention than producing the next asset itself.

This has changed where I spend my own time.

Once a requirement is clear, more of the execution can be handed to other people. Storyboarding, image generation, video generation and editing can all be handed over. I can set out how the work should be done and check it as it progresses.

That still leaves a lot of work with me: understanding what the client means, collecting feedback, passing that feedback back to the production side and checking that the next version still matches the agreed direction.

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I can hand off more of the making itself. The client conversations still come back to me.

A new version can be useful because it changes that conversation. The client becomes clearer about the direction. Two people who appeared to agree react differently to the same material. Someone new joins the review and reveals that an earlier approval was not final.

At other times, the pictures change, the script changes and the edit improves, but the same unresolved question remains behind the work.

That is the difference I now pay attention to. When the next version becomes easier to produce, I ask what changed because we made it. If the client is no clearer about what should be made and someone else still needs to approve it, we have produced faster without getting much closer to done.

We may simply have reached the same unresolved decision sooner.

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