Appearance
Moments
A moment is one meaningful beat inside a video — the product being revealed, the title card, the person talking to camera, the closing sign-off. A video is one thing you can point at; a moment is one of the several things that happen inside it. Moments exist because a creative team does not want "that Nike film" — they want the bit where the shoe turns in the light. Moments are how the library becomes searchable at the grain people actually think in.
Every moment belongs to exactly one video. There is no such thing as a free-floating moment.
How moments connect to everything else
Read it as sentences: a video is cut into moments; each moment sits on a shelf that says what the beat is doing; each moment also carries a few side descriptions; and the video itself belongs to a brand.
Where moments come from
Moments are found automatically. Software watches the video and detects where one shot ends and the next begins, and each of those becomes a candidate moment. A model then looks at the whole video and describes each beat. A person can correct any of it afterwards, and we record which of the two said what — so a human correction is never quietly overwritten by the next automatic pass.
Underneath the moments sits a rawer layer: the mechanical cut list, before anything has been said about what a beat means.
The three levels
Moments are described at three levels of increasing detail. The top two are fixed lists; the bottom one is deliberately open.
Level one — the browse groups. These exist for navigation: the headings you would see down the side of a page. Nothing is ever labelled with a group; a group is worked out from the shelf a moment sits on.
Level two — the shelves. This is the real classification: what the beat is doing. Each shelf belongs to one group.
| Group | Shelves under it |
|---|---|
| Product | Product reveal · Feature highlight · Product demo · Product in use |
| Interfaces | Interface |
| Typography and titles | Title card · End card |
| Brand in motion | Logo animations |
| Design | Data visualisation |
| Editorial | Transitions |
| Effects | (none yet — the group exists, no shelf sits under it) |
| Shot types | Dialogue · Establishing |
Level three — the detail. Underneath each shelf sits a free level for the specific craft: a full-page title, a logo morph, a chat window, a chip reveal. This level is open on purpose, so a genuinely new technique can be recorded rather than forced into an existing word.
Two rules that govern shelves
A moment may sit on several shelves, and exactly one is its main shelf. A closing card that also contains an animated logo genuinely belongs to both, and forcing a single choice would lose real information. The main shelf is the one used to title the moment and sort it.
Some shelves are catalogue rather than browse. Dialogue and establishing shots are kept and searchable, but not offered as creative reference, because nobody pulls up a talking head for inspiration. Nothing is ever thrown away; catalogue only means "don't put this on a shelf at the front."
The side descriptions
Alongside the shelf, each moment carries three short descriptions that you filter by rather than browse by.
| Description | What it answers | The vocabulary |
|---|---|---|
| Subject | What is literally on screen | product · people · environment · brand marks in motion · evidence and charts · typography |
| Story job | What the beat does in the story | hook · problem · reveal · demo · proof · transformation · trust · call to action · sign-off · explanation · other |
| Framing | How it was shot | establishing · hero · product detail · macro · lifestyle · reaction · reveal · demonstration · interview · point of view · b-roll · transition |
These are separate from the shelf on purpose. "A person talking" is what is on screen; "proving a claim" is what the beat is for; "an interview two-shot" is how it was filmed. The same moment can be all three at once, and collapsing them into one label was the mistake this three-part split exists to avoid.
A real example, straight from our data
OpenAI is the brand with the most moments so far. We have broken 192 of its videos into 2,644 moments. Sorted by the shelf each one sits on, the five biggest are: Dialogue (851), Product Demo (699), Title Card (216), Product in Use (191), UI (172).
That is a useful shape to look at. The single biggest of them — Dialogue — is one we deliberately treat as catalogue rather than creative reference: worth keeping and searching, but not something a team pulls for inspiration. So the largest thing in the library is the thing we have decided not to put on a shelf at the front, and the genuinely creative beats are the smaller numbers below it. That is what you would expect this early, and it tells you where the next work is.
Where to look next
- Every value you can actually choose — the full vocabulary: the subject, the shelves, the story job and the framing.
- How many moments we hold, and how they are spread — the state of the data.
- Where the live system disagrees with this page — the conformance report.
- What is still undecided about moments — the open questions.
- The exact tables and columns — the data reference.