Phase 0 · Foundation Assessment — BEA-15 2D / Motion Assets to Spec

The permanent base layer (FAD) for all downstream work. Written before analysis; reconciled against Phases 1–5 so it remains the stable foundation those phases build on. One-liner under assessment: "One approved creative → every platform spec (social, Amazon, print, motion) with product-aware cropping." Owner: Sam. Category: Production Automation. Build type: backend-automation.

1. Success criteria (measurable, time-bound)

The central finding carried through every later phase is that this project's value lives almost entirely in one empirical question — can Beats' product-framing judgment be reduced to a brand-ratified, auditable preservation envelope? — and that the render/conform pipeline is largely commodity. Foundation success is therefore defined around retiring that question cheaply before any build, plus the operational floors that prevent "innovation theater."

• [ ] Pre-build validation gate cleared (binding, before any pipeline build). Within 6 weeks of project start, replay ≥150 historical Beats approved/rejected framing decisions through a candidate geometric preservation scorer and measure agreement; gate passes only at ≥80% agreement AND a brand owner countersigns a ratified threshold document. Below 80% or no ratification → project is reclassified commodity-buy and rescoped/killed, not built.
• [ ] CV-recall benchmark passed on a real Beats catalog (parallel pre-build gate). Within the same 6 weeks, off-the-shelf detection (MediaPipe / YOLO / Apple Vision) achieves ≥85% recall on a labeled set of ≥200 real Beats SKU/logo assets (including glossy-black-on-dark and lifestyle-occlusion cases). Below bar → fall back to fast manual-ROI draw, do not claim "confirm in seconds."
• [ ] Production-usage floor met post-launch (anti-theater kill switch). By 3 months after first production release, ≥30 approved masters/week flow through the system end-to-end measured from pipeline logs, not demos, and ≥60% of crop-required jobs (not just scale/pad jobs) are auto-cleared or resolved in-system. Below either floor → declare theater and sunset.
• [ ] Brand-incident-free auto-clear in production. Over the first 90 days of production auto-clear, zero brand-flagged "product cropped / off-brand" incidents on auto-cleared (non-human-reviewed) outputs; first such incident triggers immediate threshold review.
• [ ] Producer time genuinely removed, not relocated. By month 3, median producer time per approved master to obtain all platform variants drops from the ~25–40 min/variant × 6–10 variants baseline to ≤30% of that baseline, measured by role-segmented time tracking — the benefit must land on the same role (producers) that bears the new ROI-confirm cost.

2. Decision-maker profile (Three Ledgers)

• Public ledger (what we pitch): "One approved creative becomes every platform deliverable automatically — social, Amazon, print, motion — and it is product-aware, so the headphones and logo never get cropped wrong. We save producer hours and kill the Amazon/social rejection-retry loop." This is the visceral, fundable pitch that Finance (Ben Coleman archetype) and producers (Sofia Reyes archetype) can both restate in one sentence.
• Shadow ledger (what the decision-maker actually optimizes for): the sponsor (Sam) is optimizing for a defensible, demonstrable internal-tooling win that survives the funding review and does not become an embarrassment — i.e., a tool that visibly removes producer drudgery and that the brand team will stand behind. Underneath: avoiding the two failure shapes the org has seen before — (a) a tool that demos well and is quietly unused (Réti's "tool graveyard"), and (b) an automated output that ships an off-brand crop and becomes someone's named incident (Whitfield's accountability fear). The real optimization is risk-adjusted credibility, not raw automation coverage.
• True ledger (what will actually get built): realistically, Architecture B's tractable core on top of Architecture A's commodity substrate — a spec-registry + conformance + ingest-normalization batch layer (mostly bought/assembled, off-the-shelf FFmpeg/libvips/Sharp + a conformance gate), with a CV-ROI + geometric preservation envelope + brand-owned auto-clear threshold as the only genuinely Beats-proprietary layer. Motion will likely ship in a later increment than static (it is the weak flank everywhere). Architecture C (slots + constraint solver + edge render) will not get built as a funded program — at most its slot/intent-contract kernel survives as a research direction. What ships is gated behind the pre-build validation probe; if that probe fails, the "true ledger" collapses to "buy Auto Reframe + a folder watcher + a normalization step."
• Owner / sponsor: Sam (manifest owner). Accountable for the funding case and for sequencing the pre-build validation as a gate, not a milestone. Critical dependency: a named brand-governance owner (Whitfield archetype) who must agree to ratify and personally stand behind the auto-clear threshold — without that role committed, the proprietary value is un-bankable.

3. Constraint inventory

4. Scope boundary

• In scope: Backend automation that takes one approved master 2D/motion creative and produces conformant platform deliverables (social, Amazon, print, motion) via master-plus-delta rendering; a machine-readable spec registry consulted at job-time; a conformance gate with structured per-clause error reports; ingest normalization for the real mix of approved-final formats; a CV-ROI + geometric product-preservation envelope with a brand-owned auto-clear threshold and a human-review queue for boundary cases; and — as the gating first work item — the historical-replay validation + brand-ratification + CV-recall pre-build probe. Static 2D is the primary launch surface; motion is in scope but explicitly sequenced behind static.
• Out of scope: Slot-based master authoring and any tool change forcing creatives off Photoshop/After Effects (C's premise — declared dead); a bespoke constraint-solver / "executable intent contract" formal layer (research direction only); zero-render edge/CDN delivery of pre-release imagery (security-blocked, and infeasible for motion); a self-discovering/auto-updating spec registry (registry is human-owned with a cadence); building the commodity render/conform engine from scratch where an off-the-shelf component (FFmpeg/libvips/Sharp/MediaConvert-class) suffices; the speculative "specs that negotiate back" idea.
• Recursion budget acknowledged: max 3 per phase. (Phase 5 explicitly recommended no phase recursion — the validators confirmed Phases 3–4.5 rather than invalidating them — so recursion budget is reserved for genuinely new disconfirming evidence, e.g., the pre-build probe failing.)

5. Assumption log

Gate: success criteria defined, constraints mapped, decision-maker identified → set phaseGates.0-foundation = passed in manifest.json.