Whistleblower — sources

Reference ads (Foreplay, analysed 10-06 in ~/research/davidaistar/foreplay/)

• 02_whistleblower — Resilia (oregano + black seed oil), 3:42, 9:16. Beats (paraphrased): a masked "other woman" opens by claiming every married man she meets says the same thing about his wife (0:00-0:16) → reframes the men as wanting connection, not villains (to 0:51) → describes wives who changed and stopped trying, b-roll of tired women (to 1:45) → an off-screen interviewer asks for a tip and she reveals a hidden gut cause behind the fatigue and bloating (to 2:34) → mechanism and product shots (to 3:29) → CTA framed as putting her out of business (to 3:42). Production: AI still of the masked speaker with AI lip-sync, EL voices for speaker + interviewer, AI b-roll, real phone footage of the product. The mask hides imperfect sync. Keep: the confession hook, the hidden face, the "it's a hidden cause, not a character flaw" turn, the interviewer cue at the pivot (optional [Q]), the closing "I'd like less of this work" device. Change: no taboo persona; the insider is sympathetic and admits a fault in her own system; the stake lands on the mom, not on a rival; no lip-sync at all (the face is hidden, the mouth never shows).
• 05_founder — Azure batana oil, 3:10. Insider exposé: "15 years in the industry, I saw companies target desperate women" → agitation → personal anchor (her mother) → mechanism → product → proof → BOGO + guarantee. Keep: "years at the desk" as the insider's credential; a personal anchor makes the confession land. Change: never a made-up founder or brand insider (REPORT §3: deceptive); our insider sits outside the brand, at the school.
• 08_authority — Skincu, 2:37 whiteboard. Failed solutions rated 2/10 → 4/10 → 6/10 → product 100/10. Keep: failed solutions named generically and quickly in beat 2, in the moms' words. Change: no rating device here (that belongs to an authority/timeline format); an authority PERSON reads as testimonial in statics, so this format stays a story.

davidaistar method notes

• REPORT §2.5: obscured-face formats (masked whistleblower, silhouette, back of head) hide imperfect lip-sync; the format solves the uncanny problem. REPORT §3 row 2: "PROOF FIRST… Medium. Insider confesses (school attendance officer: what we see every morning)."
• analysis/diff_podcast_dialogue.md §2 lists taboo/masked-confessional personas under don't-adopt for brand/compliance risk and calls the mask "a cope for bad lip-sync". Resolution (SKILL.md §2): the shock persona stays out; the insider structure with a hidden face is in. In cartoon-h3 there is no lip-sync to hide at all; the hidden face is the genre and keeps the insider consistent without a face to hold.
• analysis/diff_copy.md: "80% of realism is the script" and the missing dialogue doctrine. Applied: confiding counter-talk, short lines, interviewer cue ≤8 words.
• analysis/diff_ai_ugc.md §2: face-blur to pass a provider's face filter is a likeness-safety circumvention, never adopted. Our obscured face is staging; if a provider refuses a frame, switch route (core §3).

Our receipts

• Recipe A: MAP.md §2A (credible person inside the story; exhibit A nurse 2.48 ROAS; vindication $1,638 at 1.81; mom-1st POV on all 3 song winners; brand-voice song 0.72). MAP §2B: testimonial pairings weakest (1.21-1.31).
• Stakes (verbatim, grep-checked in the bank): #3 "She's only allowed 18 absences before she reaches truancy status. Last I checked she was at 15." [reddit 1t3hejh]; #6 "you start getting threatening letters in the mail if your child has too many absences. You can get put in jail." [reddit 1rfciee]; #7 "If you guys are late too often they might involve cps" [reddit 199olsy]; raw external row 4 "We got a truancy letter for being tardy basically every day because in the mornings she fights me tooth & nail…" [reddit 1qketj9] (stakes-raw-external.md).
• School-side vantage exists in VOC: research/voc-blame-2026-10-04/thread_1de6jwp.txt (a commenter "deals with this currently from the other end" on attendance logging; "School ended up taking both of us to truancy court"). No verbatim line from a school employee about wrongly blamed parents was found, so the insider's lines are written; the mom's line is the verbatim one.
• Survey 09-04 (n=157): 90% were waking the kid themselves; 51% almost didn't buy over "will it wake them" (answer with the mechanism, not a promise of immunity).
• 10-01 S2 attendance office pack: Clerk as explainer with mom narrating, voice BeydSYsiEvkOxDwdvf89; live in ad set 120249989091270232, verdict 10-08. Its Clerk intents say "mouth moving", which this format forbids for the insider.
• Code checked 10-06: run.py flags (--stage, --char-ref, --env, --product-truth, --style choices claymation/bergamot/paper/pixar/bluey/disney3d/skeleton, --prompts-only, --spend, --regen); pack.py voice order (elevenlabs_voice_id → voices.MOM → first voice → profile); vo_check.py NARRATION overall_min 3.4; assemble.py frames_under_yavg8; clipqa.py black-frame luma <8; h3.py "No on-camera dialogue, no lip-sync"; omni.py subcommands (board, ref, avatar, pick, lock, gen, verify, broll, assemble, cost) and the Haar frontal-face detector in refscan.

starpop articles (creator's own write-ups, read 2026-10-06; ~/research/davidaistar/starpop/txt/)

• Applied: facebook-instagram-ad-sizes-and-safe-zones + how-to-preview-a-facebook-ad-before-publishing → §10 placement gate (the article names the UI regions but gives no percentages; the 14/35/6 % Reels box is Meta's published spec, cross-checked 10-06). are-ai-generated-ads-allowed-on-meta → §11 upload hygiene (Advantage+ enhancements off, live preview day 1). meta-video-ad-metrics-hook-rate-hold-rate-ctr-cpa, how-much-budget-to-test-meta-ad-creatives → §11 read/floor lines where this format needed them.
• Read, nothing new for this format: ai-ad-formats-guide (format ↔ job table, shot-list order, references before video: already core §4), fully-ai-generated-ads-are-here-to-stay (strategy essay), how-to-calculate-break-even-roas-for-meta-ads (proposed for core §6, not format-specific), how-to-add-correct-captions-in-any-language + how-to-fix-wrong-capcut-auto-captions (script-as-source captions = our assemble rule already; his SRT → CapCut/Premiere import maps to Remotion per core §2a).
• Not adopted: (1) "an AI actor must not voice a fictional first-person experience / fabricated testimonial" (formats guide, AI-ads article, organic-vs-paid) — conflicts with Fish's claims unlock (10-02) and our dramatized mom-narrator recipe; risk is Fish's call, recorded here only. (2) His 25-char vertical caption line cap — VideoAd chunks by its own MAX_PHRASE_CHARS 28 + two-line fit, Fish-set. (3) Organic-first discovery (ai-organic-social-vs-paid-ads) — Dawn's message and checkout path are proven, Testing CBO is our discovery lane. (4) His model picks (Kling O3 Pro, Sora 2, P-Video) — registry roles only; untested candidates.