🎞 Director Studio: From Novel to Film
The Director Studio lives on the Infinite Canvas — it's the site's “project mode”. Give it a novel and it lays out characters, scenes and shots on the canvas; you review shot by shot, render shot by shot, then merge everything into a finished short drama. In a hurry? One-Click Film is the fast lane. Want control over every cut? Read on.
Step 0: Start with a story
- You have text: paste the novel straight into the Director Studio's left panel (up to 20,000 characters).
- You have one line: use the AI Novelist on the canvas — give it a one-line idea (plus up to 3 reference images) and it writes the full story first, then breaks it into shots.
- Set the spine first: who wants what, who stands in their way, what is everyone hiding — if you can't say it in three lines, the shots won't hold up either. The Director Studio pins this “story spine” at the top, and every shot's motivation must land in a visible action, because a video model only films surfaces; it won't invent your causality.
Example one-liner: “A rookie lawyer finds a 20-year-old unsent letter in a case file — and it was written by the firm's founder.” The Novelist expands it into a complete short story with conflict and a twist — then you decide whether to break it down.
Step 1: AI breakdown (free — no points)
- Set the target shot count in the left panel, then break down — you get exactly that many shots. Extra beats are merged into neighbouring shots; not a single line of dialogue is dropped.
- The breakdown produces three things on the canvas: character cards, scene cards and shot nodes (the “🧭 Tidy Layout” button arranges them in one click).
- Every line of dialogue is pinned word-for-word to its shot; fragments are merged into adjacent shots, never deleted. Read through the shot overview and confirm the story survived before moving on.
Step 2: Lock the look — people and places first
- Review each character card: regenerate what you don't like, or upload your own image to replace it (the first upload swaps straight onto that card).
- One art style for the whole film. Every character and scene card must come from the same style — mix styles and the final cut looks like several shows spliced together.
- Reference images are ordered scenes first, characters after, and shot prompts refer to them with @Character / @Scene anchors — never “image 1 is…”, because numbers drift and faces swap.
- Each shot carries a head-count anchor: exactly as many people as the shot calls for — no clones, no twins.
Step 3: Render shot by shot
- Each shot runs 1–15 seconds by content. The film is organised into endpoints: each endpoint is one generation of up to 30 seconds, longer films split automatically, and endpoints can run in parallel (up to 4 at once per account).
- Pick the model and sound toggle per shot. For seamless joins, enable chaining — the previous shot's last frame becomes the next shot's first frame.
- Re-roll a single shot without touching the rest; failed generations don't charge points.
- The finale is protected: the last shot's dialogue gets pacing priority, so a slow camera move can't squeeze it out.
Step 4: Merge and export
When every shot is ready, hit merge in the Director Studio: segments are joined in order (each trimmed to the length you set), and the finished film lands in My Works for preview and download. If a segment is missing, the merge names the exact shot — nothing slips through quietly.
Beginner strategy: finish first, polish second
- Make your first film small: 30–60 seconds, one main location, one or two leads, and walk the whole pipeline once.
- Accept the AI's script structure; only rewrite lines that change where the story goes.
- One main action per shot (the iron rule from the previous guide applies here too).
- Get a complete first cut, then go back and re-roll individual shots. Doing it the other way round is how projects die halfway.
FAQ
The breakdown gave me a different number of shots than I asked for?
The shot count you set is a hard target: extra beats get merged with all dialogue kept. If the source genuinely has fewer beats, it won't pad with empty shots — the page tells you honestly how many it made.
A character's face changes halfway through?
Almost always mixed art styles at the lock-in stage, or references bound to the wrong shot. Go back to Step 2: one style for everyone, the same card set on every shot, and check the anchors before rendering.
Merge says a segment is missing?
That shot hasn't rendered successfully yet — go back to the canvas, finish that one shot, and merge again. Nothing else needs to re-run.