How Studio works.

Studio walks every film through the same five stages. The order isn't decoration — each stage takes the previous stage's output as its input. Skipping ahead leaves later stages without the context they need.

• Setup — premise, tone, runtime, format. The shape of the film.
• Core — characters and their relationships, the visual bible, the narrative bible.
• Sequence — the scenes themselves, sluglines and intent. Story spine.
• Timeline — blocks under each scene. The 10-second units that get generated.
• Render — assembly, color, sound, export.

You can revisit any earlier stage at any time. Edits propagate forward — change a character's identity anchor in Core, every block downstream knows.

A film is the unit of creative work. It can stand alone, or it can be an episode inside a series. Either way, the pipeline is the same.

A series adds two things: a shared bible across all episodes, and an ordered season list. Episodes inherit the visual bible, the cast, and the tone from the series — so episode two doesn't have to relearn what episode one looked like.

Use a film when you're making a one-off. Use a series when you're making a show.

A block is the atomic unit of generation. Every block owns its own camera (lens, movement, framing), its own lighting (key, fill, color), its own dialogue (if any), and its own beat (what changes inside the ten seconds).

Blocks are nested under scenes. A scene typically contains three to twelve blocks. The block-level controls are what make Studio feel like directing instead of prompting — you're not asking for a clip, you're staging a shot.

Blocks reorder via fractional positions, not integers. That means two people editing the same scene won't deadlock each other when reshuffling.

When you bind a character to a film in Core, Studio captures an identity anchor — the visual fingerprint that has to survive every cut. Subsequent block generations reference the anchor as a constraint: this is the same person, lit differently, framed differently, but recognisably the same.

Anchors are how Studio avoids the canonical AI-video failure mode where a face shifts between cuts. Re-anchoring a character mid-film is a deliberate decision — Studio asks before doing it, never silently.

A bible is a structured piece of context that every generation in the project reads from. Studio maintains four:

• Visual — the look. Palette, lens family, lighting tendency, grade.
• Narrative — the story spine, the themes, what each act has to do.
• Character — the cast and their relationships.
• Sound — the score's register, the diegetic vocabulary, the silence.

You author the bibles in Core, and they thread through every prompt downstream. Edits apply to every future generation; past generations stay where they are unless you re-render them.

Studio runs on two tracks. The Free track means you bring your own API keys — for Imagen, Veo, Runway, Eleven, Gemini — and Studio drives them client-side. Your keys never leave your browser; we never see them.

The Pro track is a flat $19/month. Studio uses our keys, server-side, with per-modality rate limits that fit a serious project. You don't manage providers, you don't track quota, you don't juggle billing.

Switching tracks is one toggle in Settings. The work itself doesn't change — only who pays the model fees.

When the render stage finishes, Studio exports three artifacts:

• The cut — H.264 MP4, 1080p or 4K, ready for upload or grading.
• The screenplay — industry-standard formatting, ready for a printer or a producer.
• The storyboard — a key-frame contact sheet of every block, ready to share or print.

All three are downloaded to your machine. We don't host them — once a render is exported, it's yours. Studio retains the project so you can re-render later, but the artifacts are local.