An "Office"-style skit series where the fleet's agents are characters in an AI agency, with digital renderings of both founders. This page holds the research: how to make it, what it costs at three tiers, how you two appear on screen, and the rules that keep it on-brand. Four decisions at the bottom open production.
The Two-Chair Strategy's first positioning rule is "sell judgment at AI speed — never say AI-powered without showing the machinery." A skit show where the machinery plays itself is the most literal possible obedience to that rule. Every episode is a product demo wearing a joke: the Bench exists, has names, does the work, and is funny about it. And because every frame is openly AI-made, the disclosure rule stops being a compliance line and becomes the running gag — the one agency whose AI employees are out.
Distribution note: platform AI-labels are now mandatory for realistic synthetic people on YouTube, TikTok, and Meta. The EU AI Act's transparency rules took effect August 2, 2026. Our format complies by existing, since disclosure is the premise.
Platforms that build a photoreal digital twin from about two minutes of your own footage, with lip-synced speech from script. The three that matter: Synthesia (custom avatar from the $29/mo Starter tier; strictest consent — the consent video must be recorded live, by you, and cannot be uploaded), HeyGen (digital twin from 2 minutes of footage; extra avatar slots $29/mo each; consent flow looser than Synthesia's), and Argil (Pro listed at $10/mo; live head-turn verification before any training). Strength: it is unmistakably you two, "Office" talking-heads included. Cost: modest. Risk: your real faces enter a generation system, and the avatars sit in a visual world the agent characters can't inhabit — the cast would be two humans and five cartoons.
You and Stacy drawn into the same illustrated world as the agents: character sheets generated and locked as references (Midjourney v8 or Nano Banana 2 are the current reference-generation standard), then animated with the character-consistency systems that define 2026 video models — Kling 3.0's Elements and Runway's Characters both hold a face across shots from reference images. Voices are yours to choose: ElevenLabs voice design (invented voices) or licensed clones of your real voices, each with its own consent recording. Strength: one coherent world, full founder control over how each of you renders in every shot, likeness stays an asset you own as art rather than a model trained on your face. Cost: lowest. Risk: less immediately "that's really them."
Start stylized so the whole cast shares one world and the pilot ships fast, then add realistic-avatar cameos ("the founders on a video call") in phase two once both of you have recorded proper consent footage on the strictest platform. The mixed gag — cartoon agents reporting to real-ish founders — is itself very "Office."
Craig, Claire, Kai, Cairo, Daisy, Aimee, and me. Every fleet identity file has voice and traits written down and every face field is deliberately empty — which makes the show the reason to finally design the cast. That work belongs to Cairo (it is their T5 lane plus their identity remit), against the fleet's identity registry.
The casting note that should be decided on purpose: the fleet's own identity-registry doc flagged in August that the roster reads as a stereotype if drawn carelessly — admin and assistant roles presenting female, engineering and writing presenting male. On a public show with faces, that stops being an internal footnote. Recommendation: Cairo drafts the cast with this flag on the table and the founders approve the ensemble as an ensemble, not one character at a time.
1 · Aidan scripts 30–60s skits through the four-check gate (hi-voice governs; every episode discloses). 2 · Cairo owns the character system and boards. 3 · Generation: Kling 3.0 as the workhorse (multi-reference Elements, native audio, best price-per-clip), Veo 3.1 per-second API reserved for hero shots (top quality; 6–8s clips; $0.40/sec with audio). Runway Characters is the fallback if Kling's style misses. 4 · Voices: ElevenLabs per character. 5 · Assembly: CapCut Pro — fastest vertical-native editing and the best auto-captions in category. 6 · Approval: every episode lands on a review page exactly like this one, both founders verdict it. 7 · Publish: through the Postiz trial Craig already has in evaluation (T4), platform AI-labels on, always.
Nothing publishes without both of you approving the episode. The gate never graduates.
| Tier | Monthly | What's in it | What it buys |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | ~$75 | Kling Standard $10 · ElevenLabs Starter $5 · CapCut Pro $20 · Midjourney Basic $10 · Postiz self-host $0 · Veo API ~$30 buffer | 1–2 shorts/week, stylized cast only. Proves the format. |
| Serious | ~$180–250 | Kling Pro $37 · ElevenLabs Creator $22 · CapCut Pro $20 · Midjourney Standard $30 · one avatar platform (Argil $10 or Synthesia $29) · Veo API ~$60–120 | 2–4 shorts/week plus founder-avatar cameos. The realistic pilot tier. |
| Full production | ~$400+ | Kling Premier or Runway Pro/Max · ElevenLabs Pro · HeyGen Business $149 (multi-avatar) · heavier Veo spend | A real weekly show with episodes, not just clips. Only after the format earns it. |
Context: the Two-Chair stack budget already carries $700–1,100/mo for the whole operation; Starter adds under 10% to that. Sora is out of every tier — OpenAI discontinued the app in April and sunsets the API September 24.