Glossary

The vocabulary Ordinary Animator uses. Where our word differs from the industry's, the entry names both -- so you can connect what you read here to terms you have seen elsewhere.

AI Assistant -- the AI helper you talk to by voice or text to ask questions, navigate, and get things done. You have one Assistant. Behind it sit one or more configurable agents ("agent" is the industry term); the Assistant draws on them for you. See The AI Assistant.

Agent -- a configurable specialist that powers the Assistant, with its own instructions, context, and tools. Manage agents in the project's Agents view. Most of the time you just talk to the Assistant; agents are the advanced layer behind it.

Built-in operation -- a small, single-purpose step the platform runs itself (text-to-speech, assemble, trim, voice changer, ...), as opposed to a ComfyUI workflow. (Not "virtual workflow".)

ComfyUI -- the AI generation backend. It runs either locally (your machine, via the Chrome extension) or on Comfy Cloud (managed GPUs). See ComfyUI Integration.

Cookbook -- the library of recipes, both the built-in ones and the ones you save. (Not "strategy library".)

Draft voice -- the voice a character is set to use by default, marked with a star, that one-press dialogue generation uses for every line.

Entity -- anything Ordinary Animator tracks with a type, an ID, and properties: a project, episode, scene, shot, character, location, prop, and so on. See Entities.

Fountain -- the plain-text screenplay format the Script is written in. See fountain.io.

Media gallery -- the shared pin-board of images, clips, and audio for an entity. Starring marks an item as approved; archiving sets it aside. See The Media Gallery.

Phase -- one of the nine stages of the production pipeline: The Foundation, The Cast, The Story, The Script, The Visuals, The Sound, The Boards, The Shoot, The Final Cut. Each is our plain handle for a real studio stage. See The Production Pipeline.

Recipe -- a saved sequence of steps that produces media (an image, a clip, a voice track). Recipes chain built-in operations and ComfyUI workflows. (Not "strategy".) See Recipes.

Screenplay -- the technically precise name for the Script: the specific kind of script used for film and animation (scene headings, action lines, dialogue), as distinct from a stage play or other script forms. Ordinary Animator's scripts are screenplays, written in Fountain.

Script -- the text the human writes, and the source the whole production is driven from: scene breakdown, shots, dialogue, and audio all flow from it. It is not just a view -- it is the authored content. You write it in Fountain format (in any editor, e.g. Google Docs) and bring it in. The technically precise term for it is screenplay. See the Script reference.

Shot -- the most granular unit of production: one image or video clip. (The old term "panel" is gone -- it is always a Shot.)

Storyboard -- a quick preview image for a shot; the place to get blocking (staging) right cheaply before generating a finished clip.

Swimlane / Arc -- the Story Arcs view plots arcs (story threads) across episodes, grouped into swimlanes (rows).

Take -- one version of a generated or recorded result (a line of dialogue, a clip). You star the take you want to keep; others are archived.

Look -- an alternate version of a character, location, or prop that inherits its Story properties but can override its Appearance.

View -- one of the pages of a single entity (Media, Properties, Timeline, ...), switched from the page header. (Formerly "modes".) See Navigation.

Voice changer -- turns a recorded performance into a character's voice, keeping the original timing. An alternative to text-to-speech when you want a real performance.

Workflow -- a ComfyUI node graph that generates media. Its App Inputs are the parameters Ordinary Animator fills in; a recipe step maps its Step Inputs to them.