Shots

A shot is the most granular unit of production -- a single image or video clip with a specific camera angle, characters, dialogue lines, and generated media.

Shots live within scenes, and all of an episode's scenes and shots form a single table of contents. You reach a specific shot from the episode's shot views: open a shot from the Storyboard, Brief, or Shot List view, or step between shots with the prev/next control in the page header. See Navigation.

Shots are reviewed and reordered across the episode's shot views: Storyboard (a frame grid), Brief (the inputs going into each shot before generation), and Shot List (pacing and running time). Shots can be reordered by dragging, inserted between others, and shelved, duplicated, or deleted from the shot's menu -- the order determines playback order in the sequencer.

The shot has three views, switched from the view dropdown in the page header:

Media -- all images and video generated for this shot, and where you run recipes to make more.

Properties -- everything that defines the shot, in one place.

Sequencer -- the episode sequencer opened on this shot: the same editor, the same tracks, with playback and render controls.

Shelving a shot

Shelve, on a shot's menu in any of the episode's shot views, sets the shot aside without deleting it. It keeps its place in the running order and everything it holds -- its media, its properties, its length -- but it leaves the cut: it shows no picture, adds nothing to the running time, and the episode plan stops asking you to finish work on it. The shot's page titles read "(shelved)" while it is set aside, and the plan step that would have covered it says "1 shot shelved" so nothing disappears without a trace. Unshelve puts it straight back, exactly as it was.

The first shot of a scene cannot be shelved -- there is no earlier shot to take on its time -- so the menu item is offered but disabled there, with the reason.

Shelving is a fact about the shot. Approving a criterion in the episode plan is a different thing: your decision about one step of the work. See The production pipeline.

Drafting a scene's shots

Each scene heading in the shot views carries one AI control, and what it does depends on where that scene has got to.

• A scene with no shots yet offers Generate shots. It reads that scene's screenplay text, builds the shot list from it in screenplay order, and then fills in as much of each new shot as it can -- name, description, camera and blocking directions. A scene that had nothing a moment ago has no work of yours to protect, so a first pass goes as far as it can in one click.
• A scene that already has shots offers Regenerate shots instead. It re-reads the screenplay and drafts the same craft properties, but it protects the work you have already done. A field you left empty is filled in straight away. Anything it would have written over a value you already have becomes a proposal on that shot instead of a change: your value and its suggestion sit side by side, with Accept and Reject. A detail you typed that the screenplay does not happen to mention is simply left alone.
• Regenerate shots can add shots. If you have added direction to the screenplay that calls for a shot the scene does not have -- "Close up on Sally" -- running it creates that shot, in screenplay order, filled in from what the screenplay says. It only ever adds: it never removes a shot, never reorders the shots already there, and a shot the screenplay no longer mentions is left exactly where it is. If a new shot cannot be placed from the screenplay it goes at the end of the scene and the result line tells you so.

Either way it runs on one scene at a time and only when you ask it to, and it reports progress as it works. Afterwards, step through the shots to review what it wrote -- and to accept or reject whatever it proposed.

When the screenplay names a character, location, or prop you have not created yet, the Brief view offers to create it.

Media

The Media view is the shot's Media Gallery -- all images and video generated for this shot. Star an item to approve it; Set as storyboard on an image marks the frame that stands in for the shot until it has a clip. This is also where you run Recipes: select a recipe, configure inputs for each step, and run. Results land back in the gallery.

Render dialogue audio

A shot whose span contains dialogue gets one extra button above its gallery: Render dialogue audio. Press it and the shot's dialogue is rendered as one audio file per character, timed exactly as the Sequencer has it -- each line where it starts, the gaps you paced, and nothing that is not that character speaking. No music, no effects, no other voice. The files land in this shot's gallery, one per speaker, each labelled with whose voice it is, so a two-hander gives you two.

Each file is exactly as long as the shot. A character who falls silent halfway through gets silence to the end, and a character who does not speak until late gets silence before their first word. That matters because the file is fed to a lip-sync video model alongside the shot's start image: the audio has to be the length of the clip it is driving. You do not have to pair them by hand -- see Animate this shot below.

When the button turns orange, what is in the gallery no longer matches the Sequencer -- the shot's length changed, a line was dragged, a take was re-recorded, the line was reworded, or someone who used to speak here does not any more. Press it again and it goes back to normal. It never renders on its own: a shot's length moves every time you drag a cut, and re-rendering on each drag would bury the gallery in near-identical clips. The colour is there so you can decide when it is worth doing.

Pressing it only ever adds audio. A track for someone who no longer speaks here is left where it is, because you may already have generated a clip from it -- the colour tells you it is stale, and clearing it out is your call.

Before the first render the button is not orange -- there is nothing to be out of date yet.

If the scene's dialogue clips are not yet linked to the script's lines, you get a note saying so in place of the button. Opening a Sequencer links them for you, so the button appears once you have done that.

Actions

Actions are picked from Select Action in the shot's Media Gallery. These are the ones you reach for most on a shot; the gallery offers the full set.

Animate this shot

Once the shot has a still, Animate this shot turns it into a clip. It writes a motion prompt from the shot's action and camera directions, then hands that and the still to a video model.

A shot with spoken lines is animated differently. Instead of a silent image-to-video pass it uses an audio-driven model -- the character's own dialogue drives the mouth -- and it arrives with both inputs already filled in: the shot's still as the character image, and that character's dialogue track as the audio. Nothing to hunt for, nothing to drag in.

These models lip-sync one character at a time. In a shot where more than one character speaks, the first speaker's track is the one filled in; every other speaker's track is in the same gallery, so swapping the audio input gets you theirs.

If the shot has dialogue but you have not rendered its audio yet, the card says so and points you at Render dialogue audio; until you do, it animates the still silently. It will not render the audio for you -- that stays your call, for the reasons above -- and it will not run anything on its own. Render it and the card switches over on its own.

A shot with no dialogue is unaffected: it animates the way it always has.

Organize

The Organize action rearranges media rather than generating it. A destination tree opens beside the gallery: choose Copy, Move or Link, select items, and send them to another entity. Starring the keepers happens here too. Click Done when you have finished and the panel returns to the usual actions.

Properties

The Properties view gathers everything that defines the shot, in two parts.

Cast & Setting Assignments

What is in the shot, in four sub-sections. These save immediately as you change them, and they inform the AI Assistant and feed recipe inputs automatically.

• Characters -- which characters appear. For each character, pick the look to use and set their performance for this shot: Emotion / mood, Facial expression, Body language, and Gesture detail. Leave the list empty and the shot inherits the scene's cast, which the section names for you.
• Location -- where the shot takes place, and which of its looks to use. Inherited from the parent scene unless the shot sets its own, so the background can change part-way through a scene without splitting it. The location's starred image becomes an input to recipe steps that generate the shot's background. See one location or two, and changing location mid-scene.
• Props -- which props are present.
• Dialogue sequence -- the dialogue lines that fall in this shot, in the order they play, each with how far into the shot it starts. Read-only here. See below.

Which dialogue a shot contains

You do not assign dialogue to a shot. A line lives on the Sequencer, as a clip you can drag; a shot is a span between two cuts. Whichever lines fall inside that span are the shot's dialogue, so moving a clip past a cut moves the line to the next shot, and moving a cut changes what the shots either side of it say. Nothing has to be kept in step by hand.

The Dialogue sequence section lists what currently falls in the shot and offers Open the sequencer, which is where you change it. The screenplay's lines are placed on the Sequencer for you when you open it -- every line that does not have a clip yet, and never moving one you have already positioned.

A line is allowed to run across a cut. It plays over both shots, and it belongs -- for audio -- to the shot its start lands in. See Audio & Voice Pipeline.

Attributes

The shot's descriptive fields, in cards down the page:

Card	What it holds
Core properties	The shot's name, first, because it is what you look for
Frame	The single "how to shoot this" surface: location, camera and action directions, the beat label, the shot's purpose and beat description, character blocking, and the composition fields (shot type, subject, framing, camera angle, camera motion, depth of field, background treatment)
Look	Lighting intent and any visual style override. These are the ones a shot usually shares with its scene
Audio properties	Delivery style, SFX / ambient, music cue
Editorial properties	Transition in / out, and timing notes

Text fields save when you click Save on each row.

Proposed values

When Regenerate shots on a scene has something to suggest for a field you have already filled in, it does not write it. The suggestion waits at the top of the shot's Properties view as a proposed value: your current text on one side, the suggestion on the other, with Accept and Reject. You can edit the suggestion before accepting it. Accepting writes it onto the shot and clears the proposal; rejecting clears the proposal and leaves your value exactly as it was. Empty fields are filled in directly, so a proposal always means "this would have replaced something of yours".

Note: This protection belongs to the scene's Regenerate shots control, which never overwrites a value you typed. The Screenplay page has an action of the same name in its Edit menu, and it is a different thing: it re-reads the whole screenplay and rebuilds every scene's shot list from it. Shot edits can be lost that way, so leave that one until the shot structure is stable.

Sequencer

The Shot Sequencer is the episode sequencer opened on this shot -- the same editor, the same tracks, windowed to the shot's span. It is not a read-only preview: dialogue and sound are placed here just as they are on the scene and episode Sequencers, and zooming out reaches the rest of the episode. It also carries playback controls, an output resolution selector, and a video fit mode selector (Cover, Contain, Fit90, Constrain, Constrain90).

The Render Shot button (orange when the shot has changed since its last render, green when it is up to date) produces a video clip using server-side rendering. Its dropdown holds the rest:

Action	What it does
Render Shot	Renders this shot to a video clip
Render Scene	Renders all shots in the scene and concatenates them
Render Episode	Renders all scenes in the episode
Play Rendered Shot Video	Opens the last rendered clip (Close Rendered Shot Video puts it away again)
Download Rendered Shot Video	Downloads the rendered clip
Delete Rendered Shot Video	Removes the rendered clip

During a render: still images loop for the shot duration; video clips are trimmed from a configurable start offset; if a video is shorter than the shot duration the last frame is held; per-character audio tracks are mixed together.

When a shot render finishes, the finished clip is added to that shot's Media gallery, labelled "Sequencer render". If the shot did not already have a chosen clip, the render also becomes the shot's clip, so it shows up on the sequencer straight away. If you had already chosen a clip for the shot, that choice is kept -- the render just sits in the gallery until you pick it. Re-rendering the same shot refreshes the same gallery item rather than adding another one.