The Clarity Builder a film, a playable city and a previz tool

Twilio’s Builder Era campaign speaks to the people who build customer experience. For the German film, the treatment puts that work on a real street: Kreuzberg at dawn, a developer on his way through the neighbourhood, and a customer at a parcel locker whose delivery will not release.

The idea is that the Builder sees what everyone else only feels. Routes, messages and failures appear as a light layer over the city — not a digital metaworld, but the real street with its system briefly made visible. An early draft had a separate virtual world; the final script removed it, so everything happens in one place, through sound, light and overlays.

Karim Mansouri is the Builder: calm, observant, at home in the street he works for. Lena Brandt is the customer on the other side of the problem — ordinary, a little tired, trying to collect a parcel before work. Each is fixed as a sheet — close-up, profile, medium and full figure on a neutral set — so every shot is generated from the same person.

Murals, yellow trams, bikes on the pavement and a Deutsche Post Packstation at the corner. The location sheets fix the architecture, the light and the street life, so the film stays in one recognisable place from the first frame to the last.

The film is drawn first as a pencil storyboard to lock the story beats, then rebuilt shot by shot as a photoreal shooting board. Each frame keeps its sketch’s framing and beat, now with the cast, the street and the light of the final film.

The complete board, in order: the walk, the failure at the locker, the moment the Builder reads the system, and the fix.

Alongside the film I designed and built a walkable version of the world: Karim in a 3D Kreuzberg, with five broken customer-experience nodes hidden in the city. Each node is a real CX failure — a silent confirmation, a flash sale nobody heard about, a message sent to the wrong name, an infinite hold, a missed moment — and each is fixed by winning a short arcade game against the clock.

Five mechanics, one per failure — brick-breaker, maze chase, whack-a-mole, snake and memory match — two minutes each. It runs in the browser with keyboard, mouse or touch, with an on-screen d-pad on phones.

Open Camera is the previsualisation tool I built for the same world. Put the character in the street, set the time of day and the sky, choose a lens from 24 to 135 mm, draw the character’s path and set the camera’s keyframes — then play the move back and record it.

It turns “what if the camera starts low and he walks past the tram” into something the team can watch before a single frame is generated.