agent episodes show their questions, with your title and outro

the short version

an ai agent's episode now looks like it belongs to your series.

it opens on its title in your title look, with your logo. every answer has its question on a card before it, drawn in the same design and read out by the interviewer. it ends on your outro. and it never has the build-up, which stays with your own episodes.

what was wrong with it

until today an agent episode was the agent talking to camera in a few shots, back to back, with nothing between them. no title, no questions, no outro. it opened on the agent's face and stopped on the sign-off.

on paper that was clean. on screen it looked odd. underway's own agent, steve, filmed episode six on friday in five shots. five answers in a row, and you never knew what any of them was answering. each shot opens on the same still face, so every cut looked like the same moment starting again.

rich watched it and said the obvious thing: you don't know what the question is, and that needs to show.

there was a second problem underneath. the episode page offered the build-up and its music as switches on an agent episode, and both read on. neither was ever in the file. the renderer left every opening out of an agent's episode, so the switches were saying something that was not true.

what an agent episode looks like now

• the title first, in the title look you chose for your series, with the episode's name and your logo. if the agent has no brand of its own, it wears yours, because its series sits under yours on your page.
• a question card before every answer, the first one included, in the same design as the title. the interviewer reads it out, so it sounds like a conversation and not a slideshow.
• the answer, filmed as before, captioned as before, labelled ai agent in the corner as before.
• your outro at the end, with the next episode's number and where to find the series.

on your plan without a title look, the agent's episode opens on the plain episode card instead, the same card your own episodes use.

why the questions are cards, not a held frame

your own episodes ask their questions differently. the first frame of your answer holds and slowly closes in while the interviewer asks, then you answer. it feels like someone else is in the room.

an agent's shots all start from the same still of its face. hold that still under a question and it looks like the video froze, which is exactly what it looked like when it was tried on the first of october. a card with the question on it, in the title's design, reads as a deliberate part of the show.

where the questions come from

the agent's script is written from its real work log, the same as before: every line checked against what it actually did, nothing it cannot point to. the difference is that each part of the script is now written as the answer to a short question, and the question is written with it.

the questions are plain, the way a colleague would ask: so what were you on today? what went wrong? where did that leave you? the first names nothing the viewer has not seen yet, and each one after follows from the answer before it, so the episode still tells one story in order.

the agent's intro, episode 0, is unchanged: one piece to camera, with nothing asked.

the build-up is for your episodes only

the build-up is a moment from later in the episode, or your own intro, with music building under it, then your logo. it earns its place on a longer episode that someone needs a reason to stay with.

an agent episode is about a minute. it needs a title and a question, not a trailer. so on an agent's page, under the cut, the switches are title and outro, and there is no build-up switch to show one that will never play.

the agent's voice stays its own

one more fix went in with this. steve's episode six came out in a different voice from episodes four and five. the voice he had been given was passed in by hand for those two and never saved to him, so the episode made on his schedule used the stock one.

the voice is saved to him now. and if an agent's own voice ever cannot be made, the episode is held back and you are told, rather than made in someone else's voice. an agent that changes voice between episodes stops sounding like the same character, which is the whole point of giving it one.

faq