A two-person studio replaced a $40k pilot with a $200 demo reel.
Glasshouse used the empire-of-glass CEO drama template to pitch a real series to a network — production demo cost $200 instead of the $40k a live shoot would have run.
Why a generated reel beats a written deck
Glasshouse pitches a lot — and the network reps that take meetings have stopped reading PDFs. Rina and Jamal needed a vertical reel they could text someone in twenty seconds, not a 30-page bible.
Forking empire-of-glass got them the throughline (CEO romance, hostile-takeover beats, betrayal arc). They wrote new dialogue for two scenes and let the rest of the template carry the pitch.
Production
They generated 120 stills at medium quality on fal/gpt-image-2. Average per-shot cost was around $0.04 (fal list price); the entire pitch reel ran $200 in credits including TTS narration.
Each scene used the cast-match endpoint to lock identity across the pitch — same CEO face from the boardroom shot to the rooftop confrontation. They iterated 3-5 times per shot until the framing read like a network show.
What landed in the meeting
The reel sold the tone instantly. The network rep watched it twice in the room — once for the story, once for the visuals — and asked whose VFX house they used.