Builds the complete campaign shot manifest for a product launch behind a hardware gate - physical products get the six-shot spine (three-quarter hero at 15-30 degrees above deck, straight-on elevation, top-down flat lay, three macro details of the genuinely differentiating materials, exploded or floating-component shot, and in-hand scale shot); software products swap the material macros and exploded shot for UI-moment macros and a multi-device family shot - with lens, lighting scheme, and crop plan per shot plus a frozen set block so all frames read as one campaign. Use when someone asks "what shots do I need for a product launch campaign", "build the shot list for our product photography", "how many product photos do we need for the launch", "turn our launch imagery ideas into a single shot manifest", or when planning launch imagery rather than a single frame. Do NOT use for launch timing or channel sequencing - use launch-plan-sequencer instead; for moving-image shot lists, use video-storyboard.
---
name: product-campaign-shot-grammar
description: Builds the complete campaign shot manifest for a product launch behind a hardware gate - physical products get the six-shot spine (three-quarter hero at 15-30 degrees above deck, straight-on elevation, top-down flat lay, three macro details of the genuinely differentiating materials, exploded or floating-component shot, and in-hand scale shot); software products swap the material macros and exploded shot for UI-moment macros and a multi-device family shot - with lens, lighting scheme, and crop plan per shot plus a frozen set block so all frames read as one campaign. Use when someone asks "what shots do I need for a product launch campaign", "build the shot list for our product photography", "how many product photos do we need for the launch", "turn our launch imagery ideas into a single shot manifest", or when planning launch imagery rather than a single frame. Do NOT use for launch timing or channel sequencing - use launch-plan-sequencer instead; for moving-image shot lists, use video-storyboard.
---
# product-campaign-shot-grammar
"Shoot a bunch of angles and pick later" burns a shoot day and still misses the frames the store listing and gallery actually need. The fixed grammar is itself a premium signal - audiences read the structure as flagship launch. Without it, the two default failures of launch imagery arrive together: macros pointed at decorative noise instead of the genuinely differentiating details (the second shoot nobody budgeted), and set drift that makes six frames read as three campaigns.
## Operating procedure
Run the steps in order: gate before grammar, because the hardware question decides which grammar applies; freeze the set before shot 1, because drift is the default failure of multi-asset work; derive per-shot optics from the already-proven single-shot skills rather than re-deciding them per frame.
### Step 1: Gate the grammar and gather the inputs
Ask the gate question before anything else: does the company ship hardware it manufactures itself? If not - the common software case - shots 4 (material macros) and 5 (exploded or floating components) are replaced by UI-moment macros whose subject is the screen (feeding screen-compositing-craft) and a multi-device family shot. Never macro-fetishize third-party phones or laptops the client does not make, and never invent internals.
Then gather exactly these inputs:
1. **Charter**: the client's brand charter block. Paste the charter block if one exists. If the client has a charter but the foundations pack is not installed, elicit the needed values directly and label them provisional. If no charter exists at all, halt and route to premium-design-foundations - never substitute worked-example values.
2. **Differentiating details**: the product's 3 genuinely differentiating details. Hardware: the materials and interfaces the design team obsessed over. Software: the 3 UI moments only this product has. These become the macros. If they are unknown, stop and ask - macros of decorative noise are the most common wasted frame.
3. **Destinations**: product page, store listing, gallery, social - each with its required aspects.
4. **Launch date**: the manifest schedules backward from it.
5. **Execution path**: photo, CGI, or generated. Default when no studio is engaged: photoreal-prompt-craft, so a picture still comes out the other end.