The Timeline That Builds Itself
How We Build
João Verissimo is a Motion Director at Fantasy. Using Claude Code, he built a tool that turns a brief into a script, an AI voiceover, and a Premiere-ready timeline.
What made him build it?
He built it becaues he saw an opportunity: to automate the manual parts of his own edit process. The manual version of this process had existed for two years, so he knew exactly what he was trying to automate.
“It wasn’t much of a frustration but an opportunity that came to my mind with all that the team was sharing internally. I figured I’d give it a go and see if it was possible to create a tool that could ‘transform’ our manual process into a more automated one. I had all the information on my side and had been working on it for almost a couple of years, so it was easier for me to try making this work."
What did the first hour in Claude Code look like?
The first question was whether code could touch Premiere at all. Everything else depended on the answer.
“First thing I tried was really just exploring if there could be a script that could communicate with Premiere and make edits directly in the software. Since this whole process is based on Mogrts, that would be critical. If there was not a way to make that happen, I’d probably shift my approach to something else.
"The first explorations worked almost at first try, and at that time I was even only working in Claude Chat, downloading the files and then running on my machine. The shift to Claude Code was inevitable, and that’s when I started to focus on what’s needed for a product like this to work not only on my computer but across other machines, to make this a collaborative tool.”
When did it stop being a side project?
Creating a tool the team could use on projects was always the target. João kept his own doubts in front of him to push the work further, and within a month it went from a personal experiment to a tool running on a live client engagement.
“That was always the main goal. Of course initially I had doubts if it was possible to get there. I tend to be more skeptic in order to push my ideas and work as far as possible, to make it real and not just a vague idea of something that could work. But the more time I dedicated, the closer I got, and eventually it became a usable tool and a new way of working for the manual process we had defined a while back.”
Did building in the open change it?
João kept the team up-to-date along the way. He posted a new Loom every week for a month, from the first rough script to a working tool deployed live. His peer's reactions fed back into what he built.
“I was excited with the progress I was able to achieve as time went by. I started to understand that there was something there that could be interesting not only for the client and process where we already had this going, but also as a discipline. As I was building, I was also talking with teammates that definitely made me add and/or change some of the features and flows of the tool.”
Imagine being able to create hundreds of product walkthroughs and being able to easily update them as the product evolves, without having a large content production team.Reaction to an early demo
Where did Claude Code struggle?
While the features came together rather quickly, the parts of the experience a Motion Designer cares about, naturally, took the most time to get right.
“One of the things I noticed that was the hardest part to manage was animations and interactions, which for me are critical, and took a lot more time than I expected to get right. About being surprised at what Claude Code could do, I’d say most of it. I’ve never been in a position of working on a tool like this without this kind of technology.”
A motion designer took a process he had run by hand for two years and taught it to run itself. The tool writes the script, generates the voiceover, and assembles a Premiere-ready timeline, and it moved from his laptop to a live client engagement in about a month. Claude Code built every feature he asked for. What it could not do was decide when the motion felt "right"; that judgement remained with the expert.
How to build an AI-assisted video production tool with Claude Code
Write out every step of the workflow you want to automate, in order. João had run his MOGRT-based Premiere process by hand for about two years, so he knew exactly what to hand off. That written process is your spec, and the clearer it is, the less you have to explain to Claude Code later.
Find the one integration the whole tool depends on and test it first. João’s was whether code could drive Premiere directly. Premiere is scriptable through Adobe’s UXP API (the current path in Premiere 2026; the older ExtendScript still works into late 2026), so have Claude Code write a small script that opens Premiere and makes one real edit. If that works, the rest is worth your time.
João’s first versions ran in Claude Chat: generate the files, download them, run them locally. That is enough to prove an idea. Once it works, move to Claude Code so the tool becomes a real product that runs across machines instead of only your own.
The workflow was built on MOGRTs, the Motion Graphics Templates edited through Premiere’s Essential Graphics panel and populatable from data. Generating a timeline then means generating the data that fills those templates, so every output stays on-brand and an editor can still adjust it afterward.
João layered in script generation, an AI voiceover (through a text-to-speech API such as ElevenLabs), and a brief and setup builder over successive weeks, each from a real gap he hit in use. Build the piece you actually need next, not the whole feature list at once.
João pushed the tool to Vercel so it stopped living on his laptop. The moment a colleague could use it, it became a shared workflow, and shortly after, a tool on a real client engagement. Spend your extra time on motion and interaction; those were the hardest for Claude Code to get right, and for a video tool they are the part that has to feel correct.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. Premiere exposes a scripting API, so an AI coding tool like Claude Code can generate scripts that open the app, build sequences, and populate templates. João’s AIA Timeline Builder turns a brief into a Premiere-ready timeline this way.
Through Adobe’s plugin scripting. Premiere 2026 uses the UXP API, and the older ExtendScript is still supported into late 2026. A script running in Premiere can create sequences and drive Motion Graphics Templates from outside data.
A Motion Graphics Template, a reusable animated graphic edited through Premiere’s Essential Graphics panel. Its text, color, and layout are exposed as properties, and data-driven MOGRTs can be filled from a spreadsheet, which is what lets a tool assemble on-brand edits automatically.
Yes. Text-to-speech APIs such as ElevenLabs turn a script into natural narration, which a production tool can place into the timeline alongside the visuals.
No. João is a Motion Director, not an engineer. He described the workflow he already knew and had Claude Code write and connect the code, keeping his own time on whether the motion felt right.