Your first 30-second film in Studio: a complete walkthrough

If you're reading this you've probably tried Runway or Pika or one of the prompt-and-pray tools and got something close to interesting that fell apart in the second shot. Studio's pipeline is structured to make that not happen. Here's the half hour from sign-up to export.

1. Sign up (30 seconds)

Magic link or Google. We'll email a link; click it, you're in. No password to invent.

2. Begin a film (30 seconds)

Click Begin. The onboarding asks for a title and one sentence. The sentence is the most important thing you'll write — Studio drafts the entire bible from it. Be specific:

• Bad: "A man walks alone."
• Better: "A widower walks his dog along the same coastal path he and his wife took every Sunday for thirty years."
• The good sentence has a character, a location, a relationship, and an unstated emotional posture. The model can scaffold from that.

3. Length and tone (1 minute)

30 seconds is the starting size. Pick a tone — for the example sentence above, melancholic is the obvious read. Pick a look — natural fits the documentary-style observation; cinematic if you want polish.

These choices are reversible. They're priors for the model, not commitments.

4. Core (10 minutes)

Studio drafts five sections in sequence: synopsis, atmosphere, cast, world, rules. You approve each one before the next appears. Read each draft. Hit Refine to push back ("the wife's name should be Helen"; "the dog is a labrador, not a terrier"); hit Approve when it's right.

Don't rush this. The Core is the memory every shot reads from. Mistakes here propagate; corrections here propagate too.

5. Sequence (5–10 minutes)

Studio breaks the 30 seconds into 3 scenes. For each scene you read the screenplay snippet and approve the keyframe (Studio auto-generates one in the background). If the keyframe is wrong, hit Regenerate and try again. If the screenplay is wrong, refine the description and re-render.

Approve all three scenes. The Sequence is locked.

6. Timeline (5 minutes)

Three 10-second blocks per scene. Studio queues them for video generation; the timeline visualizes status (queued → generating → generated → approved → locked → rendered). Watch them play through. Approve.

If you have Studio Pro, this happens server-side without you wiring keys. If you're on Free, paste your Veo / Runway key in Settings → Models and the same flow happens through your account.

7. Render (2 minutes)

Watch it through end to end. Tweak the colour grade if you want; reset if you don't. Hit Export. You get an MP4, a screenplay PDF, and a storyboard sheet.

Total time: ~30 minutes. It'll be longer the first time you do it (you'll second-guess your choices). Faster every film after.