Featured Case Study · Performance Creative & AI-Assisted Production
Expanding a strong-performing narrative format through new character perspectives, recognizable advertising hooks and repeatable production systems.
Ava’s Manor combines mystery, renovation and character-driven storytelling. The creative challenge was to communicate that world quickly enough for user acquisition while developing concepts that could remain fresh across multiple variations.
Rather than treating each video as an isolated execution, I explored how a strong-performing narrator-led direction could become a broader creative system.
01
The starting point
The British Narrator concept used cinematic scenes, character introductions and an unresolved mystery to make Ava’s world immediately understandable. It became a strong-performing creative direction and provided the foundation for further narrative experimentation.
The next question was not simply how to reproduce it, but how to retain its clarity and intrigue while changing the central hook, character perspective and storytelling device.
02
Expanding the format
Each direction retained the narrator-led foundation while changing the opening device, protagonist or character dynamic. These concepts were developed for testing and are not presented as individually validated performance results.
Could a recognizable character archetype make Ava feel more iconic while preserving the mystery-driven tone?
The focus shifted from introducing the story to defining Ava’s personality. A sequence of heightened cinematic incidents built her mythology before reconnecting the narrative to Ava’s Manor.
Could a familiar high-conflict hook lead into the character-introduction structure that had already performed strongly?
A “bad grandma” opening—familiar in mobile game advertising—transitions into a police lineup featuring several main characters. The lineup creates a modular framework for changing suspects, character order and mystery endings.
Could the same narrator-led structure work from a non-human protagonist’s perspective?
Pepper becomes the audience’s way into the manor. The story introduces multiple characters through the dog’s observations before returning to a mystery ending.
03
A repeatable AI-assisted workflow
To make production more structured and repeatable, I created a custom ChatGPT Skill that helps turn creative ideas and scripts into organized shot lists and actionable generation prompts.
This gave each scene a clearer purpose before production began and made it easier to maintain narrative continuity across multiple AI-generated shots. I then directed and refined the generated results before bringing selected footage into motion, sound design and final editing.
04
Building repeatable production systems
Alongside campaign creative, I built After Effects systems that removed repetitive setup and made frequently tested formats easier for the entire team to use.
The system covered nearly 20 in-game rooms and environments. Within each room file, artists could choose one of three renovation styles and automatically trigger the change from the before state to the selected finished design at the 15-second mark.
To keep After Effects performance manageable, the system was divided into individual project files. It replaced manual furniture swaps and animation with a repeatable workflow used frequently across the team.
Several commonly used After Effects card-gameplay formats were consolidated into a shared file. Artists could drag the appropriate gameplay pre-composition into a UA project instead of rebuilding the mechanic for every variation.
The template reduced repeated setup, improved consistency and made it easier to combine narrative concepts with different gameplay sections.
05
Outcome & learnings
British Narrator showed that cinematic, narrator-led storytelling could communicate Ava’s characters and mystery effectively. The subsequent concepts expanded that foundation through recognizable hooks, ensemble character introductions and a new protagonist perspective.
The Room Renovation and Card Gameplay templates extended the same thinking into production—turning frequently tested formats into repeatable tools for the wider team.