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01 · Citizen Coach

Citizen Coach — AI Officer Practice

20 s · 1080×1920 · consumer app · regulated claims

The brief

Sell a US citizenship-interview practice app to nervous first-time applicants — a high-anxiety purchase for an audience with good reason to distrust anything that looks like an immigration shortcut.

The approach

Three beats, twenty seconds. A lip-synced persona opens, real in-app footage proves the product works, and the CTA lands on the actual home screen instead of a title card. The persona was cast as an earnest applicant rather than a polished influencer — the ad has to feel like someone in the same position as the viewer, not someone selling to them.

The result

Delivered as a 20-second 1080×1920 master for a live App Store product. Three beats, frame-accurate captions timed from the measured voiceover, and compliance language carried in both voiceover and end card — with no outcome or approval-rate claim anywhere in the cut.

What the casting decision cost

Tone was the expensive variable, not production quality. An earlier build was technically clean and tonally wrong — a confident, glossy presenter for an audience that is anxious and skeptical. It read as a sales pitch and undercut the product.

The other recurring failure was dead air. Real screen recordings are mostly the app waiting on a user, and untrimmed footage kills pace inside a twenty-second cut. Every recording now passes through silence detection and is trimmed to its speech window before it reaches the edit.

Scope of work

Concept and script · persona casting and direction · AI video generation · screen-recording capture and edit · voiceover · captions · compliance review · 9:16 master.

Next → Ella AI Care — brand demo film