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Lesson 5 of 16

Reverse-engineering a reference video

Members

Pick a real outlier, have Claude Code pull its frames apart, have Gemini analyse it with the house analyst prompts, correct what it got wrong, and turn it into a prompt file

33 min readUpdated Sep 3, 2026
  • Claude Code
  • Gemini 3.1 Pro
  • Google AI Studio

The fastest route to a video that travels is to remake one that already did. Not copy it: remake its mechanics. The camera height, the order of the beats, the second the sound changes state, the detail people argue about in the comments. The surface (the city, the creature, the phenomenon) gets swapped for your own; the skeleton underneath is what you take, and nobody owns it.

This lesson is that process by hand, end to end. The Lab's Studio tool automates the analysis step from a pasted link, and Lab members will mostly use it. Learn the manual version once anyway: the correction pass in step 5 is the part no tool does for you, and you cannot correct an analysis you have never made.

In this lesson

  • Step 1: Pick a reference worth the effort
  • Step 2: Download the clip for analysis
  • Step 3: Pull the frames apart
  • Step 4: The Gemini analysis in Google AI Studio
  • Step 5: The correction pass
  • Step 6: From analysis to the eleven-part prompt file

This lesson is part of the course. The Lab membership includes all of it, plus every new lesson and revision. The Previz Pack includes the lessons published at the time you buy.