Irrational Lab

Manifesto

The future will be built upon irrational decisions.

01

For those who dare to think outside the frame, ask the uncomfortable questions and throw the status quo out the window.

02

Change is coming whether you like it or not. What sets apart the ones who last is the ability to create something different.

03

Our world is curiosity. You can’t stop change: either you are part of it, or you get lost in the noise.

For Jesse Ekkerd · Pilot Institute

AI changed how creatives do what they do.

We get two paths.

We embrace it.
Or we slowly fade away.

How I got here

I was happy
editing videos.

And I kept looking for a better, faster way to do it. Every few months, that became a new system.

System 1 · The Figma era

Design. Export. Import.
Animate. Repeat.

01

Screenshots into Figma

One frame per moment of the cut.

02

Design and notes

What each screen needs, written under it.

03

Export as PNG

Into Premiere, one by one.

04

Animate by hand

Keyframes, every video, every time.

System 2 · A shared design guide

Then we built the guide together.

The Pilot Institute Design Guide, built with the team. One standard for courses and one for organic videos, and every treatment documented with real frames.

Pilot Institute info text with title and bullet points over flight footage
Pilot Institute callout naming Greg, CFI

Why I asked for this meeting

How do I automate
what I do?

Claude skills. Written instructions that turn Claude into a specialist for one job. Five of them for Pilot Institute, every rule learned from a real correction.

Organic visual guidePodcast visual guidePodcast intro builderFlight podcast notesFlight sync & debrief

The skills · real outputs

Click a skill · click the page to open it

You give it

You get back

See it work · video 0939

Every Runway Marking Explained: 65 graphics, decided by the skill.

1The skill read the transcript of the video.
2Each line on the bar is one graphic it placed, at its exact second.
3Click one: what Greg says, the treatment, the note to the editor and a preview.
00:0003:0006:0009:0012:0013:30

Treatment

Note to the editor

For fifteen years,
we bought software.

Now we can build it.

Pilot Institute already does. Nobody had built them for editing yet.

An editor’s week, before

The same hours,
every video.

01Templates lived in one old project, copied into every new one.
02Captions in a paid plugin, one seat per editor.FireCut
03Feedback in another subscription, one seat per person.Frame.io
04Five editors on two different programs.Most of the team on Final Cut Pro · me on Premiere Pro and After Effects

The moment

I went to find the
limits of AI.

Two websites
in two days

Built with AI, start to finish.

A client
portal

Logins, requests, files.

An invoicing
module

Because I needed one.

“Why not my
editing tools?”

The question that started the rest.

In 3 days…

(Well, not really.) I built the tools.

The first thing I rebuilt

Templates, in three steps.

Step 1

Optimize the projects

Cleaned up the After Effects and Premiere Pro template projects.

Step 2

Native course templates

Premiere .mogrt files: edit text and color, and the animation stays exactly as designed.

Step 3

One click away

A panel inside Premiere and After Effects that drops them on the playhead.

Phase 2

Ad templates

Loaded and being refined.

Course templates

One look,
whoever edits.

Live in Premiere

One click.
On the playhead.

First the usual way, from Essential Graphics. Then the panel: pick a graphic, press Insert, edit the text. Installs on any editor’s Mac with one double-click.

Live in Premiere

Captions, without the subscription.

6 s
to transcribe 582 words
76 s
573 captions on the timeline
1.5 h
what captions used to take, now minutes
Subs ILAB panel, step 1: Transcribe
1 · Transcribe
Subs ILAB panel, step 2: Edit
2 · Edit
Subs ILAB panel, step 3: Corrections
3 · Corrections
Subs ILAB panel, step 4: Timeline
4 · Timeline

Documented for the whole team

Every tool ships with
a guide.

English and Spanish. All guides will live in one shared place for the team.

One year · list prices · annual billing

6
Every year
$4.2k
in subscriptions for this team. Ours cost nothing per seat.

Sept 2026 list prices: FireCut Pro $20/mo per seat billed yearly (Team plan $34/mo) · Mister Horse (Premiere Composer) $198/yr · Frame.io Team $21.75/mo per seat billed yearly. Sources: firecut.ai, misterhorse.com, frame.io.

The Graphics Sheet workflow

From transcript
to timeline.

One more thing…

Our own production platform

Jarvis

Every tool, one place, built for how we work.

Why online too?

For anyone who
needs it fast.

No Premiere, no After Effects. An editor in a hurry, a producer, someone on the road: captions or a Pilot Institute graphic from the browser, even from a phone, straight into CapCut.

BrowserPhoneCapCutTransparent video

Inside Jarvis

Production, end to end.

Demo in Jarvis ↗
Subtitles · web

Captions in any browser.

The same engine as the Premiere panel. Transcribe, fix words in place, translate into 7 languages, and export.

.srtBurned-in .mp4Transparent .mov7 languages

Projects save to Jarvis automatically: open them from any computer.

Pilot Institute podcast frame

Coming next · built for courses

Every graphic of a course,
in one export.

01

Approve the guide

The skill’s visual guide for the lesson.

02

Send the sheet

The Graphics Sheet goes into Jarvis.

03

Render in bulk

Every infotext as a transparent .mov.

04

Drop it in

An XML places each one at its time.

Half built today. Coming in the next versions.

Already in the works

What’s next.

Premiere

Our own Composer

Premiere Composer is a paid plugin of animation presets. We rebuild only the ones we use, as our own panel, and add more as we need them.

Ads

Ad templates, phase 2

54 ad templates in 16:9, 4:5 and 9:16 are already loaded. Next: refine each one, so a new ad is mostly text and media.

Courses

Older courses, remade

Courses made before the new templates get their animations rebuilt, so every course looks the same.

Final Cut Pro

For the whole team

The panels for Final Cut, about 2–3 weeks each with testing.

Editing

Silence finder

Find and cut the silences in a recording before the edit.

Audio

Audio cleanup

Leveling and noise reduction, Auphonic-style, in-house.

Review

Our own review tool

Comments on the frame, versions and approvals, finished.

And then

One bigger idea

On the next slide.

The biggest idea

Tools for our
students.

Pilot Institute teaches editing and drone courses. The same tools, under the Pilot Institute brand, could go to the people taking them.

CaptionsTemplatesReviewPilot Institute brand
Irrational Lab

The future will be built upon irrational decisions.

irrationallab.com