I made a short film this year for my wife's fortieth. Three minutes, fully animated, no camera, no crew, the whole thing generated. The first pass came back and the man at the centre of it, me, had a different face in almost every shot. Older in one, rounder in the next, a stranger by the end. So I did what you do. I rewrote the prompt. Added adjectives. Described him more carefully each time, and each time the machine handed me back a different person who matched the words and not the one before him. The fix, when I found it, was not a better description. It was to stop describing. Take the three frames where he looked right, build a reference from them, feed that back in. I could not specify the character until I had already seen him. Your brand is the same, and it is costing you more than a film.
The first pass always drifts
Here is what happened, in order, because the order is the whole point. I wrote a careful description first. The output ignored it in the ways that mattered. The character was recognisable as a sentence and unrecognisable as a person, because a sentence is not a face. Only once I had a rough pass in front of me could I see what was wrong. And seeing what is wrong is a completely different act from imagining what is right. One is editing. The other is guessing.
Every creative tool I use now behaves like this, and so does every business I have ever sat across from. You cannot write the thing from a standing start. A blank page gives you back your own assumptions in cleaner sentences. You need something made, something flawed and in front of you, before the real decisions become visible at all. The first version exists to be looked at, not to be right.
The reference comes last
The reference is the document that keeps a character consistent across a hundred shots. Here is the part people have backwards. You do not write it first and generate from it. You generate, you find the handful of frames that are true, and you reverse-engineer the reference out of them. The rules come after the evidence, never before. The reference is a description of something that already exists, not a wish for something that might.
That whole film cost about three hundred pounds in credits. A hundred and seventy of it went before I understood this, generating version after version of myself, a stranger each time, because I kept trying to pin the face down in words instead of pinning down the frames that worked. The money was not the price of the film. It was the price of insisting on describing before I would look.
Of a £300 film, spent generating my own face wrong, because I tried to write the rules before I had anything real to write them about.
When I cut an awards film for a client a little later, the same principle ran in reverse and saved two days. That brand had a system already built, a real one, decided and written down before anyone touched a timeline. Pointed at it, the tools took an edit that used to take two days and did the backbone of it in an hour. Same software. The only difference was whether there was a finished reference to execute against or a blank one to guess at.
You wrote it in a vacuum
This is the mistake nearly every founder makes with their own positioning, and it looks responsible while you are making it. You block out a morning. You open a clean document titled something like "Our Positioning", or you paste the website into a chatbot and ask it to sharpen the message. And you get something back. It is accurate. It is tidy. It is also completely dead, and you know it is dead, because you read it again and feel nothing, and you cannot say why.
It is dead for the same reason the first version of me came back a stranger. You described before you looked. A positioning written from a standing start is only your existing assumptions in better grammar, and the chatbot is worse at this than you are, not better, because it has even less to look at. It was not in the room when you built the business. It never met the client who stayed nine years. It is doing exactly what I was doing with the prompt. Generating something that matches the words and misses the person.
A position written from a blank page is only your assumptions, handed back to you in cleaner grammar. — on why the clean document feels dead
It is already in the evidence
The thing that makes you different is not waiting to be invented. It has already happened, several times, and you have stopped noticing it because you are too close to count it as remarkable. It is in the client who chose you over someone cheaper and never once mentioned price. It is in the real reason the last three good ones stayed, which is almost never the reason on the website. It is in the sentence a client said on a call that made you think, that is it, that is the thing, before the afternoon buried it.
Finding a position is not a writing task. It is closer to editing. You gather what the business has already done, you find the handful of moments that are unmistakably true, and you build the rule out of them. The clarity was always downstream of the evidence. That is most of what the workshop is, when it works. Not a morning inventing a brand in a clean room. Four hours pulling the reference out of a business that has been generating usable frames for years and throwing them away.
One thing to do this week
Close the blank document. You are never going to find it in there.
Instead, take your last three clients worth having and write, for each, the real reason they chose you. Not the reason that sounds good. The actual one. The thing they said, the problem they had that you happened to be the only sane answer to. Three honest answers, side by side. The pattern across them, the thing all three were really buying, is the first true frame of your reference. You did not invent it just now. You finally looked at it. Everything you build afterwards, the website, the content, the deck, is only keeping the character consistent across the shots.
Pulling that pattern out of your own business is genuinely hard, because the thing that makes you different is the thing you can no longer see. That is the whole job of the Brand Clarity Workshop. Four hours, the founder, a written report. £1,500, fixed. Book it at kevaltanna.com/brand-clarity-workshop.