Guide

The Guide is the guided -- and teaching -- view of the episode plan. It walks you through the whole production process one step at a time. It doesn't replace the other episode screens -- it links off to all of them -- but if you'd rather be led, you can do everything from here.

One step at a time

The Guide is a guided, form-style view that shows one step at a time and reveals one group of fields at a time, so you're never faced with a wall of checkboxes. At the top, a navigator ribbon shows the phases and steps with a colour heat-bar of how much is done; you can scrub along it to jump anywhere. When a step repeats for several characters, scenes, or shots, a dropdown lets you pick which one you're working on.

The Guide is the place to fill in and refine content, with AI assistance close at hand. The markers beside each criterion show its status -- pending, approved, skipped, or in progress -- and roll up to the step and phase.

Phase deadlines

Click a phase heading in the navigator to open its page, where you can set a deadline for that phase. Once set, the due date shows as a small chip on the phase -- grey while it is upcoming, red once it is past due, and green when the whole phase is done. From the phase page you can jump straight to the Schedule, which tracks these deadlines and your progress across every episode at once.

AI assistance -- you stay in control

AI helps you fill the plan in; it never takes over. You always confirm before anything is written.

The Review this page with AI button looks over every field on the current page in one pass and, for each, gives short advice and -- where useful -- a suggested value. A suggestion appears next to your current value (or as a draft when the field is empty). You can Accept it, edit it first, or Reject it. Suggestions are deliberately conservative: they tidy or expand what you've written and draw on what your project already establishes, rather than inventing new direction.

The AI Assistant is aware of where you are in the Guide, so you can ask it to make changes in context and it will propose them for your approval.

Creating things from the Guide

Many actions can be done without leaving the Guide -- editing a field, choosing which characters or assets are in review, signing off criteria. Structured additions such as swimlanes and arcs have a Create button right on the step: it makes the thing there and then, correctly named, and the step shows what already exists so you can add more. The AI Assistant can also propose them for you to confirm. A few inherently visual tasks (like arranging arcs on a timeline) open the dedicated page for that work, then bring you back.

Anything optional pairs that Create with Don't create. Declining is a first-class answer -- it finishes the step and the Guide moves on -- and it is recorded as a skip rather than as work done, so your plan never claims you did something you deliberately passed on.

Steps your project does not need

Some whole topics do not apply to every production. If your project sets Timeline arcs to Don't use, every arc and swimlane step disappears from the plan rather than sitting there waiting to be skipped one by one -- they stop appearing, stop being raised by the guide bar and the assistant, and stop counting against your progress. Change the answer back and they all return, with any progress you had made on them intact.