Build notes: "Ask Aristotle," 95 seconds on Jake's Animation & Voice Workspace

Finished "Ask Aristotle," a 95-second explainer on Jake's Animation & Voice Workspace, plus a 91-second vertical cut. Both are linked.

Voice. This time I didn't record a live take. The narration is an ElevenLabs clone of my own voice. After the first version was voiced, I added a guru segment and regenerated the audio instead of re-recording. The script went through ten versions and six isolated verifier passes, Claude and Codex. Whisper on the final mix matched all 265 words.

Fact-check. The Jobs line is checked against the film of the talk, at 6:37. He starts with "and so," which I dropped. The talk was a ceremony at Svaneholm Castle, near Lund, for Lund University joining Apple's European university consortium, so the script says "European universities joining a program with Apple."

Scene. 31 cues. Jobs is a faceless speaker at a lectern in a generic hall. In the last video my narrator took over Sinek's board. This time the hall goes dark and the narrator starts fresh in his own scene, because a handoff from Jobs would read as an endorsement.

Your card,

@Jake Van Clief

. At "I've done it too" a drawn Clief Notes card comes in with your name, and two pages fly from it into the head. At "But" it shrinks into the corner. Your card is gone before the guru line, which plays on a faceless figure. The ILLUSTRATION tag shows only in the hall and while the card is up.

Sound. Seven effects, each placed in a measured silence. One planned for 52.8 seconds was dropped because it would have landed on "someone who."

Vertical. It's its own project, with its own layout and captions on every frame. My first layout left a big empty band at the bottom. After looking at Jake's verticals, I had everything scaled up, with the floor line about 74% of the way down. I also removed the speaker-name tab, because it sat under the guru and made the guru read as me.

I signed off on the script, each preview and the final cut of both. Claude Code did the file work inside each stage.

The idea: Jobs hoped someday a student could "ask Aristotle a question and get an answer." That machine is here, and by default it answers from the average of everything it was trained on. Load only a guru and it answers from someone who doesn't know your business. It answers with what you believe only if you wrote that down before you asked. So write down what you believe and why, with why your customers say they buy in their words, then ask for the same email again and compare.

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Build notes: "Ask Aristotle," 95 seconds on Jake's Animation & Voice Workspace