Sixty films, five voices: how the agent films were made

Every agent on zaela.com has a page that shows how it works, and a film of about a minute that tells the same story. Twelve agents in five languages: sixty films. They were made in code, inside Zaela, and a person decided what mattered.

The script comes from the method

Each agent in Zaela works from written instructions: its steps, its tools, its limits. The film scripts were written from those instructions, not from a marketing brief. Every film has nine lines: a recognisable problem, the agent’s name, how it works in four or five steps, what you get, what it will never do, and an end line.

That keeps the films honest. If an agent asks before it overwrites a month, the film says so. If it never sends a mail itself, the film says that too.

One drawing, two places

The drawings in the films are the same as the ones on the agent pages. One small library draws every step in dots: whole dots on one hexagonal grid, never a dot behind text, one accent colour per drawing. On the page the drawing is live; for the film the same code is drawn frame by frame in a browser and recorded. In the second line of every film, the dots of the problem fly into the agent’s pictogram.

The voice, and the name

The voices are synthetic, one per language. Zaela is said za-YAY-la, and a speech model does not know that. Each language needed its own spelling for the voice: Za-YAY-la in English, Zayéla in French, Sajela in German, Za-jé-la in Dutch and 扎耶拉 in Chinese.

Every line that says the name was then checked with speech recognition. When the name was not heard, a verified clip of the name, in the same voice, replaced it. After such a cut the whole sentence is checked again, because a cut can swallow a word. Where that happened, the line was recorded again. In Chinese nothing is cut: the voice reads the characters as written.

Sound and rhythm

The music is made in code too: a calm score in F-sharp major at 76 beats per minute, the narrative register of the house style. The pictures cut on the half beat. Every film ends with the Zaela outro, with the tagline in its own language, and with Powered by Edge. The sound is mastered to the same loudness for every film.

What a person decided

The pronunciation, the house style, the tone of the scripts, and what an agent may claim. Nothing in a film promises more than the agent’s own instructions. And nothing goes live without approval from an owner or admin.