Clay collectible

The product rebuilt as a hand-sculpted matte clay collectible on a turntable, then match-cut to the real thing in identical framing — so the only thing that changes across the cut is the material.

What it looks like

When to use it

A craft or handmade positioning, a launch, or any brand that wants a tactile counterpoint to a category of glossy renders. The match cut is the payoff and it is what people replay.

The beat structure

The matte clay model front-on, tooling marks reading. A macro on the chalky surface, a thumbprint, a seam. The model turning past its side profile. A clean match cut to the real product in identical framing, position, scale and light.

The thing to get right

The two versions are never on screen together and the clay never returns after the cut. Clay is the setup, the real product is the payoff, and reversing that order removes the reason the format works.

The format at a glance

• Output — a video ad.
• Structure — 4 beats, each one a separately planned shot.
• Family — Viral product formats, one of the eight viral product formats.
• Recipe id — clay_figurine, which is what you name when you ask for it by hand or from an agent.

How Hermoso renders it

You do not write a prompt for this. Hermoso reads your brand first — the product, the logo, the palette, the voice — from your website or a short description, then plans the ad against this format: a beat list, the on-screen copy, and the casting if a person appears. The render happens beat by beat, and every word that ends up on screen is composited afterwards by the app rather than painted by the model, so headlines, captions and the end card come out exactly as written instead of warped and half-invented.

If you have a real product photograph, add it. It is the difference between an ad showing your packaging and an ad showing packaging a model imagined, and it is the single biggest quality lever on any product format here.

Related formats

Eight fixed creative concepts built on one product photo — an orbit, a peel, a thaw, a render breakdown. Each has a single locked idea and a one-way rule that stops the render dissolving into generic product footage.

• Packshot orbit (360°) — one unbroken 360° camera orbit around a stationary product on a clean set — the loop-ready e-commerce spin every DTC brand pays a studio for
• Collectible figure reveal — the product staged as a boxed collectible on a retail blister card, then lifted out of the moulding by hand
• Sticker peel — the product peeled off its own flat printed photo like a die-cut vinyl sticker, the background locked dead still
• Render breakdown — a CG render breakdown — wireframe to clay to materials to the lit beauty pass, each wiping across one locked frame
• 3D hero render — a premium CG-grade hero render — the product in a void with the LIGHT RIG orbiting it, not the product spinning
• Orbital zoom hook — one continuous accelerating dive from orbit down onto the product — a HOOK for the top of an ad, not a whole ad

The full catalog is on the creative recipes index.

Driving it from an agent

Every format on this site is reachable from an AI agent as well as the web studio. Hermoso ships an MCP server, so Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and any other MCP client can call plan_ad to draft the creative and render_ad to produce it, name a format as the recipe, and get a finished file back — with the same brand grounding and the same composited-text guarantees. The MCP and CLI overview covers the setup, and the generated tool reference is the complete list.