First Day on the Job
A short AI-animated film on neuroinclusive workplaces, made with a production system that keeps every shot consistent.
A young council worker in his third week is quietly stripped of a task in front of a queue, by a colleague who thinks she’s helping. First Day on the Job is a micro-learning film for the Local Government Earn and Learn programme on neuroinclusive workplaces, written by Cheryl Siecker and Neda Sajadi.
The film’s idea is simple and hard to stage: harm doesn’t need unkindness. Christine is warm, competent and wrong. If you finish the film thinking she’s a bad colleague, it hasn’t worked. If you recognise something you’ve done yourself, it has.
I started with a script and no AI video experience. The job became designing the production around the film, not just generating it.
Directing a probabilistic tool
Generate shots one at a time and keep the prettiest, and a narrative film falls apart. Faces change between shots, the room loses its geometry, the camera jumps, the style drifts. So I made the creative decisions before generation and kept them:
- Characters on a neutral grey, locked once, then reused as references in every shot.
- One room, built once. A master plate of the service centre that every shot derives from.
- Shot cards before prompts. What the audience needs to understand, what each person wants, what changes, how the camera supports it.
- A log of every generation, so a result that worked becomes the reference for the next one, and a failure tells you exactly what was missing.
A deliberate step away from the AI look
Dimensional, sculptural characters against hand-painted, slightly granular rooms. The world stays plain and bright, and the sound carries Amir’s interior. Real actors voice the dialogue (thank you, Maddy and Jimmy) instead of AI voices, and the only real likeness in the film is mine.
Where it went
Delivered in September 2026 and embedded in the programme’s learning page, then presented to university leadership in October as an example of AI used as an extension of a filmmaker, not a substitute for one.
