For creative directors, photographers, studios and brands
Turn a campaign brief into creative direction, a shot list and a production plan. You direct. We translate.
It begins with references, the eye, before the idea.
Three real briefs, really run. What you see below is the same room the Engine builds inside the app, not a picture of one. Open any instrument.
Lumen Atelier, Timeless. A single product frame. The product is the hero and it must own the centre of the image with clear margin on every side. It is a 50ml serum bottle: a heavy squat cylinder in deeply fluted smoked-bronze glass, vertical ribs running the full height so each rib catches its own hard highlight and the bottle reads as a column of light. Thick weighty glass, solid base. An oversized brushed-titanium cap, matte and knurled, seated square and fully closed. A thin polished bronze foil band around the middle. On the front, one word in a wide-tracked modern serif: LUMEN, with ATELIER in very small capitals beneath it. No other text or numbers anywhere. The serum is warm amber and throws a caustic ripple of light onto the skin behind it. The bottle is the sharpest thing in the frame. Held at collarbone height by a woman in her early twenties, blonde, sun-warm, fingers wrapped low around the base so the flutes and the wordmark stay unobstructed, chin down, eyes looking directly at the bottle. Her face sits in the upper third, one stop soft, present but secondary. Bare shoulders. Unretouched skin: visible pores, natural freckles, vellus hair on the jaw, capillary flush at the cheekbone. No smoothing, no beauty retouch. The setting is an inner courtyard in Seville at 8am, ochre lime-washed plaster, hand-troweled with a hairline crack, coral bougainvillea spilling in from the right. A hard low sun from camera right throws a crisp fig-leaf shadow across the plaster and a smaller one across her shoulder. Palette: bronze, amber, ochre, coral, honey. Vibrant, saturated, warm, nothing muted or grey. Shot on a Leica SL3 with a 90mm APO-Summicron at f/2.0, ISO 100, natural light only, fine 35mm grain. Editorial campaign photography, not stock.
Lumen Atelier, Timeless. A single product frame. The product is the hero and it must own the centre of the image with clear margin on every side. It is a 50ml serum bottle: a heavy squat cylinder in deeply fluted smoked-bronze glass, vertical ribs running the full height so each rib catches its own hard highlight and the bottle reads as a column of light. Thick weighty glass, solid base. An oversized brushed-titanium cap, matte and knurled, seated square and fully closed. A thin polished bronze foil band around the middle. On the front, one word in a wide-tracked modern serif: LUMEN, with ATELIER in very small capitals beneath it. No other text or numbers anywhere. The serum is warm amber and throws a caustic ripple of light onto the skin behind it. The bottle is the sharpest thing in the frame. Held at collarbone height by a woman in her early twenties, blonde, sun-warm, fingers wrapped low around the base so the flutes and the wordmark stay unobstructed, chin down, eyes looking directly at the bottle. Her face sits in the upper third, one stop soft, present but secondary. Bare shoulders. Unretouched skin: visible pores, natural freckles, vellus hair on the jaw, capillary flush at the cheekbone. No smoothing, no beauty retouch. The setting is an inner courtyard in Seville at 8am, ochre lime-washed plaster, hand-troweled with a hairline crack, coral bougainvillea spilling in from the right. A hard low sun from camera right throws a crisp fig-leaf shadow across the plaster and a smaller one across her shoulder. Palette: bronze, amber, ochre, coral, honey. Vibrant, saturated, warm, nothing muted or grey. Shot on a Leica SL3 with a 90mm APO-Summicron at f/2.0, ISO 100, natural light only, fine 35mm grain. Editorial campaign photography, not stock.
Your concept, in your words, never rewritten: the Creative Engine screens it, carries your brand's rules, researches its world and writes the direction while code checks every fact. From that one direction come the shot list, moodboard, previz, the proof, the plan, shot engineering and the case for your client, shared as a private link or PDFs.
Before a frame is shot, the brief decides whether the work has a chance. Everything after it is expensive: the location, the crew, the day you do not get to shoot twice.
Three moves: drop your references, let it read them, and receive a brief a studio can build from, concept to shot list.
Drop in your references, the guidelines, the intent. The Engine reads the visual DNA beneath them: colour temperature, rhythm, silhouette, where the light falls. Taste, not keywords.
Hand-troweled sand lime plaster, chalk-matte and deliberately uneven; worn terracotta underfoot, dust held in the bars of light.
It marks the selects a seasoned director would, and says why. The references you keep returning to stop being a mood and become a point of view the work can be held to.
A woman in her mid twenties in a bias-cut charcoal silk slip, chin lifted, eyes closed, a brass storm lantern held low at her hip.
A black volcanic sand beach at blue hour; the flat dark Atlantic behind, the last cold light along the horizon.
One warm source: the lantern, thrown up across jaw, collarbone and uncut beryl, against deep ultramarine.
Full frame, 85mm at f/1.8, ISO 1600. Lantern flame as key; no fill, no reflector.
What comes back is a brief a studio can build from, decision rich and campaign ready. Each brand keeps its own voice. Carry more brands without thinning the work.
Across the three campaigns above, the Engine graded every previz frame it rendered, in writing, and threw most of them out. That is the cheapest place a frame can die.
Every frame killed on a screen is a frame nobody paid a crew to light.
Modelled ranges for the example campaigns above. Not a record of cost saved.
“the subject is far too small in frame, reads as stock photography, the garment colour is denim-grey not cobalt”
No. The Engine produces the direction: the brief, the visual schema, the casting and palette logic, the shot list, and prompts written for whichever model you intend to use. Rendering is optional and runs on your own provider account. If you never generate a single image here, the document you leave with is still the point.
You own what you put in. To the extent we hold any rights in the direction, briefs and prompt packs generated for you, we assign them to you when they are generated, subject to our Terms. AI-assisted output is not guaranteed to be unique, and clearing third-party rights stays with you, including the likeness of any real person in a reference and any stylistic resemblance to a person, brand or body of work. Images and video you generate on your own provider account are also covered by that provider’s terms.
No. What it removes is overhead: the second draft of a brief, the mechanical translation of one intent into twenty model syntaxes, the previz nobody wanted to pay for. The idea, the casting call, the edit and the final yes stay with the person whose name is on the work.
Yours. You connect your own fal, Replicate, OpenAI, Stability, Runway or Higgsfield key, and every image or video generation bills to your account at your rate. We never touch your credits or mark them up. A Higgsfield key alone does not draw previz frames. Fourteen image models and six video models are callable today, and prompt packs are written for considerably more than that. Writing briefs and creative direction needs no key at all.
We do not train AI models on your content, and we do not use your briefs or references to improve anyone else’s work. Your content goes to an AI provider only to produce what you asked for, and each provider handles it under its own terms. Briefs and direction are processed by Anthropic’s Claude models; under Anthropic’s commercial API terms, inputs and outputs are generally not used to train its models, which is Anthropic’s stated position and may change. Image and video providers receive content only when you connect your own key, under your own agreement with them. The sub-processors we use are named in the Privacy Policy, so you can check them against your own client agreements.
There are three plans, all billed in pounds sterling: Director £59 a month, Studio £179 a month, Maison £399 a month. Paying annually costs £649, £1,969, £4,389 a year respectively, which is one month free. 2 free briefs a month on a free account, no card needed. Every paid plan starts with a 7-day free trial for first-time subscribers. A card is required, and nothing is charged until the trial ends. Cancel before then and you pay nothing. Image and video generation runs on your own connected provider keys, billed by those providers. House of Essenzi does not bill you for generation.
Anything unanswered studio@houseofessenzi.com
Try a first brief with no account and no card. A free account includes 2 free briefs a month, and every paid plan starts with a 7-day free trial for first-time subscribers.
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