Main VSL 2.0 · The Enquiry Hunter · review of cut 01
Ryan, this is a full pass on the 8:49 you sent over. The craft is not the problem. The type animation, the Gmail sequence, the flywheel and the ACG money stack are all better than what the brief asked for, and every figure you’ve put on screen checks out against what he says. What needs work is which businesses we’re putting on screen, the spelling of the one word the whole system is named after, and how much of the frame we’re actually using. Everything below is anchored to a timecode in your cut.
Every note, on the film
30 to change · 6 for Lloyd · 13 working
Change itLloyd to decideWorking, leave it alone
Where this cut stands
Scenes 01 to 07 are cut. The four stages and the whole close are still to come, that is another six minutes and fourteen seconds.
Your cut runs almost exactly to the read, which means nothing has been lost and nothing has been padded. It stops at “so you can focus on doing what you do best, running your business”, the last line before Stage 1. So none of the notes below are about pace or structure. The spine is right.
Fix the six rules first, because they repeat across the whole film and every one of them will otherwise get baked into the second half too. Then work the timecodes. The casting rule and the caption decision are the two that change the most frames, so settle those before you touch anything else.
Six rules that apply everywhere
Every caption
It’s The Enquiry Hunter, and they’re enquiries. The name is deliberate, it’s the hook that ties the system to Hunt Visuals, and the US spelling breaks it. Find and replace across every caption and card in the project, then check the ones baked into graphics.
Palette
Brand is pure black plus a single blue. Red now appears about ten times as the “bad thing” colour, and it costs more than it earns: it doubles the palette, it makes the problem section look like a warning banner, and it’s the one thing in the film that doesn’t look expensive. Take the villain words to white or a dim grey and let the blue mean something. If Lloyd wants one red moment, spend it on “before it’s too late” at 0:34 and nowhere else.
Casting
The single biggest note. Every cutaway is casting a client, and right now the film casts funerals, gyms, hen parties, bars and lifestyle shoots alongside the trades and clinics we actually sell to. A £1m building firm watching this counts the businesses that look like theirs. In: ACG Builders, Judge Flooring, Vision Saunas, Kodama, 360 Clinic, Wolf Hair Clinic, the solar team, professional-services offices, anything on the YouTube channel. Out: gyms and fitness, hospitality and bars, funerals, lifestyle and influencer shoots.
Framing
Cut anything so tight that the viewer can’t tell what the business does, the forearm handshake, the keyboard, the mouse, the table leg, the carpet. Macro shots are texture between ideas, not the thing carrying a sentence. Same for any handheld that wobbles: this film is built on a locked-off frame and premium clients, so shake reads as amateur, not as energy.
Layout
A vertical clip floating in one corner with 70% black around it happens about a dozen times, and there are five near-empty frames on top of that. Crop it to fill, build a three-up, or set it against a soft blur of itself. Black space is a choice you make once for effect, it isn’t a layout.
Decision
The locked call was no burned-in captions on the master: emphasis words and numbers only, with a clean SRT shipped alongside. What’s on screen is a word every half second, all the way through. The craft is genuinely good, but on a fifteen-minute film it reads like a Reel, and it competes with the graphics that should be landing. Recommendation: strip the small white filler words, keep the coloured emphasis words, every number, and the full-sentence objection cards at 7:59. The good graphics get their moment back. Lloyd to make the final call before the second half is cut, because whatever we decide has to be consistent across all fifteen minutes.
Timecode by timecode
Every frame below is pulled from your cut at the timecode shown. Scroll position tracks the film, the further down you are, the further into the edit you are.
Replace
A crematorium is the single least sellable image in the film and it lands 24 seconds in, before anyone has decided to keep watching. Straight swap for a trade or clinic client. ACG on site, 360 Clinic, Judge Flooring showroom, anything where the viewer thinks that could be me.
Respell
UK spelling everywhere. This is a Sussex film sold to Sussex businesses; the American spelling quietly says the agency isn’t local. Global find and replace on every caption.
Rebuild
Two problems in one card. Spelling is The Enquiry Hunter, capitalised, because it is the name of the system, not a phrase. And it currently reads as one more caption word. This is the first time the mechanism is named: set it as a proper card, hold it, then get rid of it. The full reveal comes later at 7:18.
Replace
You can’t tell what the business is. Rule for every cutaway in this film: one second in, the viewer should know whose business it is and what they do. If the shot doesn’t answer that, it’s filler.
Keep
Three real owners in branded workwear, straight to lens, all in one frame. This is exactly the audience we sell to and it does more in half a second than any montage. More of this.
Keep
Number over the actual work it paid for. This is the pattern the whole results section should follow and you already nailed it in the first minute.
Replace
Gyms are not the client we’re selling to and they show up at least six times across the draft. Swap for a service business, a trade van, a clinic reception, a showroom.
Cut
Nothing about this says “service business in Sussex worth £1m”. Cut it and don’t look for a like-for-like replacement, this beat wants a business owner looking at a quiet phone.
Check
Mid-animation the word renders as “othi g”. Might just be the frame I grabbed, but check the per-letter timing, if a letter lands late it reads as a render fault, not a design choice.
Lloyd’s call
He says it, so it’s fair game, but printing a swear word is a bigger commitment than saying one, and this card sits on screen for four seconds. Lloyd to decide: keep it, or set the second bullet as “saying the exact same thing as everyone else” and let the audio carry the edge.
Replace
Second funeral clip, and this time it’s under the one line in the film that breaks the fourth wall. Accidentally comic. This line should be him, alone, full frame, no cutaway at all.
Rematch
Twenty years of experience in this market looks like a time-served trade: hands, a site, a van with a faded logo. An office desk is the wrong evidence for the word.
Keep
Clean, on-brand, and it lets the word breathe. This is the treatment the other single-word callouts should follow.
Rebuild
Half a jumper on the left, a wall of 8px body copy on the right. Nobody reads it. Rebuild as one large card with the handle, the profile picture and a single pulled quote at readable size.
Replace
Same note as 1:05. This is the second gym in sixty seconds.
Keep
Three beats, one idea, built on a UI everybody recognises. Genuinely better than what the brief asked for. Leave it exactly as it is.
Check
There’s a diagonal blue stroke running off the bottom-left of the card with nothing attached to it. Looks like a leftover from another element. Delete it or finish it.
Recolour
See the palette note above. These three are the densest run of red in the film and they land back to back. Take them to white or a dim grey and the section gets colder and more expensive, which is what the copy is doing anyway.
Cut
This is the shot Lloyd called out by name. It reads as a lifestyle brand, not a service business. The line is about pulling the right people towards you, so show the right people: an owner opening a lead on their phone, a booked-out diary, a van pulling onto a drive.
Relogo
That lowercase “facebook” logotype was replaced years ago. Anyone under 35 clocks it instantly and it makes the whole film feel older than it is.
Relogo
The handwriting-style “Instagram” was retired in 2022. This is the one Lloyd spotted. Recommendation: drop both wordmarks entirely and use only the glyphs, the camera outline and the “f”, which never date, and let our own type carry the numbers. Cleaner and it stops the problem coming back next time either platform rebrands.
Check
It’s a registered club crest being used to illustrate a population number, which isn’t what it means. A simple Sussex county outline or a Worthing/Brighton aerial does the job and doesn’t borrow someone else’s trademark. Lloyd to call it.
Keep
“It wasn’t me posting a leaflet through your door”, and there’s the leaflet, with our own profile printed on it. Smart, funny, and it isn’t in the brief. Keep it.
Rebuild
At 1080p on a phone this is a grey smear. Rebuild it big: the search field and one result, scaled so the handle is legible from the back of a room.
Check
Looks like a word caught halfway through a reveal with nothing following it. Check whether the animation completes, if it doesn’t, that’s a visible bug.
Rebuild
Roughly twenty clips in one mosaic and a third of them are the wrong business: fitness influencers, a woman in a cowboy hat, leggings, bar and nightlife. It’s meant to prove scale and instead it tells a £1m trade that we mostly work with people unlike them. Rebuild the whole wall from service businesses only, ACG, Judge Flooring, Vision Saunas, 360 Clinic, Wolf Hair Clinic, the solar team, the professional-services offices. Fewer clips, all on target, is stronger than twenty that aren’t.
Relayout
The Barefoot card, the sales line and the “moved” tick each sit in a corner with 70% of the screen black. Once is a beat. Three in a row reads as missing footage. Fill the frame or cut straight back to him.
Replace
The name-drop is earned and the logo treatment is fine. The footage under it is a third gym floor. Run the three brand names as a clean type row over him, or over our own camera crew working, and keep the gym out of it.
Replace
Two macro shots back to back on “scripting” and “posting”. Too tight to read and they could be any business on earth. Use our own team actually working, the sofa shot at 7:07 is the right energy, just needs to be here instead.
Finish it
The automations screen two lines earlier at 4:45 is great, a real workflow, cropped properly, and it makes the machine feel real. Then he says “the leads that land in the CRM we built for them” and there’s nothing under it. Finish the pair: put the actual GoHighLevel pipeline up here, cropped tight on the lead cards. Two screens back to back and the whole ACG block stops being a story and starts being evidence.
Keep
£200,000, £85,000, £80,000, £400,000, each one over the actual finished work. This block is the best sixty seconds in the film and it’s better than what the brief asked for. Don’t touch it.
Relayout
A 9:16 clip parked in one corner of a 16:9 frame with a word beside it, and the rest black. It shows up all through the Judge Flooring and Vision Saunas blocks. Three fixes, pick per shot: crop the vertical to fill the frame; build a three-up so the frame is full; or set the vertical against a soft blown-up blur of itself. Never one small rectangle floating in black.
Check
Same question as the other text animations: confirm the full name lands and holds. The Judge Flooring logo underneath it is doing its job.
Keep
The brief asked for the two figures side by side. You ran them as a sequence instead, £300, then the nine dots counting out, then £40,000+, and the sequence is better, because the viewer does the maths themselves in the gap. This is the strongest run of numbers in the film.
Keep
The dots counting out under the number is the best piece of information design in the draft. Reuse that device, it’s a house asset now.
Replace
Both too tight to read as a business. Judge Flooring has a showroom and a van and a team, use those. Save the macro detail shots for a texture beat, not for carrying a sentence.
Rematch
An empty concert venue under a line about hiring office staff. The words and the picture are arguing. Their actual showroom or office, or him on the phone at a desk.
Fix copy
Two things. The phrasing needs to be 36 × 6-week trials or “36 people onto the six-week trial”, as written it says something we don’t mean. And the number needs confirming: the figure Lloyd signed off was 30 six-week trials alongside 120 leads at £4. Whichever is right, the graphic and the read have to agree.
Keep
Worthing named, £350 of ad spend, the build happening behind it. Tight, local, on-ICP. This is the template for every client block.
Keep
Worth saying because it looks like an error in a still and isn’t: the figure climbs through £93,810 and lands on £100,000, which is exactly the number he says. Every figure in the Vision Saunas block checks out against the read, £350, £25,000, £120,000, £100,000. Leave it.
Rebuild
“Go and message any of the guys on screen right now” is a challenge, it only works if the viewer can actually read the handles. Rebuild as three large cards: logo, @handle, one line of what they do. Big enough to screenshot on a phone.
Cut
Hen-party energy, and it appears twice (again at 8:35). Both out. This beat is the hinge of the whole film, everything before it is the problem, everything after is the system, so whatever goes here has to look like money.
Respell
You built the reveal and you built it right: black frame, nothing else on it, the name in blue. This is the most important single frame in the film and it currently reads “Inquiry Hunter”. It needs to be “The Enquiry Hunter”, the article included, because that’s the name, and it needs a longer hold. Right now it’s gone in about a second. Give it three, and let the music lift under it. Everything before this frame is the problem; everything after it is the system.
Keep
Drawn, drained, bent into a ring, set turning, the argument is made in pictures with no help needed from the words. Best graphic in the draft and better than the brief. It becomes the motif for the four stages, so build the stage markers off this ring rather than starting again.
Replace
Behind-the-scenes of our own crew is fine in principle, it’s the sixth gym that’s the problem. Swap for the clinic shoot or the ACG site; both are already in the bin.
Keep
Setting each objection as an incoming message, in full sentences, is the right call, this is the one place he’s answering the viewer rather than talking at them, so it should look like a conversation. Keep the full-sentence treatment here even if the rest of the captions come down.
Keep
“You’ll have the same problem a year down the line” and the year runs past in six seconds, red at both ends. Does the work of a paragraph. Keep.
Cut
Second and third appearance of the same shoot, and it’s under “the difference is that my team and I are local”. Replace with the team on a client site, a trade, a clinic, an office. Which is exactly what the line is claiming.
Swap
Last image before the film runs out, and it’s a gym. This beat wants the strongest client-site shot we own, because it’s the picture that carries into the stages.
8:49 → 15:03 · not cut yet
The four stages and the close. The shot-by-shot plan for all of this is already written, it’s in the storyboard, panels 08 to 15, and none of it has changed. Two things to settle before you start: whatever we land on for captions has to be consistent across all fifteen minutes, and the stages need a design language of their own, because they already have one in the writing.
Design direction · the second half
Lead Capture, Nurture Protocol, Strike Operation, Results Reload, and the whole thing is called The Enquiry Hunter. That is deliberate, and right now the graphics don’t know it. The four stage cards are the best chance in the film to make the system feel like a piece of equipment rather than a marketing diagram.
Where to get it from: layout and restraint, not costume. Hairline rules and thin corner brackets. Stage numbers set as small ordnance-style labels, STAGE 01, in wide-tracked mono, with the stage name underneath in New Hero Super. A reticle rather than a generic icon: the flywheel you already built at 7:24 keeps turning, and the four stages become tick marks around that ring, one lighting at a time. Precision, measurement, a locked frame.
Where not to go: no camo, no stencil fonts, no khaki, no dog tags. The moment it looks like fancy dress it stops being premium. Black, one blue, 'new-hero', and the discipline you already showed on the Gmail sequence.
And build the reveal. Stage 3 · Strike Operation is only thirty seconds, the thinnest part of the whole film, so it needs the strongest single visual to carry its weight. Plan that one first and let the other three sit around it.
8:57 to 9:44
Chapter card built once and duplicated four times. Wheel returns small, camera right, only the first quadrant lit. Half the country against a tight local radius. Real Ads Manager, cropped to results and cost per lead.
9:44 to 10:56
The longest stage and the closest to what we actually sell. Four pillars lighting up on their own words. “We handle everything” is a list, so cut it as a list. Profile before and after.
10:56 to 11:26
Only thirty seconds and the thinnest part of the film, so it needs the strongest visual to carry its weight. Real pipeline cropped tight, card appearing the moment the form is sent, pipeline and phone in one frame so cause and effect are visible at once.
11:26 to 12:04
Closes the loop set up seven minutes earlier. Real testimonial footage feeding back into the ring, then the wheel spins up and is gone for good.
12:04 to 12:26
View count races up and stops dead as the enquiry number appears. Then flip it: small local number, real jobs, same layout.
12:26 to 13:09
Music out on the first line and it does not come back in this scene. Almost no graphics, tightest framing. Discomfort needs stillness.
13:09 to 13:31
Twenty-two seconds of disqualification, listed plainly. Music returns quietly on “but if this has landed”.
13:31 to 15:03
Warmest framing, biggest music, longest holds. The offer card, the call prep ticks, the two options split screen, then ENGAGE full frame, he says it twice on camera, so show it twice, and the end card holds through the salute.