Getting started in Fiction.show Studio

[00:00:00:07]Hi, I'm Novae Caelum.

[00:00:02:01]I'm going to be showing you the Fiction.show app,

[00:00:05:13]which is a showmaking and AI filmmaking app

[00:00:08:18]that is meant to be driven with your AI agent.

[00:00:11:23]So I'm going to be showing you how to set it up,

[00:00:14:11]how to download it, get everything going,

[00:00:17:01]and then start making your shows.

[00:00:20:04]So this is the Fiction.show website.

[00:00:22:11]This is where you will be landing.

[00:00:25:20]Right now it is still on waitlist that shows on

[00:00:28:12]here, but it's going into public beta shortly.

[00:00:31:21]You will, once you have made your account,

[00:00:34:15]and either if you are coming from the sub-stack,

[00:00:37:24]this will be, you will create your account if you are not and it's in public beta.

[00:00:45:13]You will have, you will need to have a active

[00:00:48:22]subscription in order to start going with this.

[00:00:53:00]Once you've created your account, you come into your account area.

[00:00:57:18]This is where you will be able to download, download your version of the app.

[00:01:02:15]It works on Mac, Apple Silicon.

[00:01:05:22]It works on Mac Intel version.

[00:01:08:04]It works on Windows, but it requires 64-bit.

[00:01:12:09]So if you have Windows 64-bit, you're good.

[00:01:17:17]And you also will need the Studio Skills.

[00:01:20:07]So you will be downloading an app, whichever

[00:01:23:05]version of the app you need, plus the Studio Skills.

[00:01:26:00]And when I click this, that is when it downloads.

[00:01:30:24]So that will download automatically.

[00:01:34:05]There are courses, but they are not here yet.

[00:01:37:02]So depending on when you see this video, this might be live as well.

[00:01:40:23]If you have purchased courses, they will show up here.

[00:01:44:13]So you will want to download that and the Studio

[00:01:47:09]Skills, and then just make sure that both are downloading.

[00:01:56:05]When you have downloaded your app, you will install it like a regular app.

[00:02:00:17]On a Mac, you will drag it into your Applications

[00:02:03:10]folder or double-click it and then drag it in on a Windows.

[00:02:09:06]You just follow your regular installation procedure.

[00:02:14:21]And the Studio Skills, you can basically give this entire

[00:02:20:10]folder to your AI agent and say, "Install these skills."

[00:02:25:10]Two of the things that you need to...

[00:02:28:10]You can run this app on its own, but two of the

[00:02:31:10]things you need to run it optimally and more automated,

[00:02:35:22]you will need a Max subscription to an AI agent that works on the desktop.

[00:02:43:22]You probably want to use either Claude or OpenAI's ChatGPT desktop app.

[00:02:52:03]I highly recommend using OpenAI with the Codex and the Astra agent,

[00:02:58:10]just because that is the only agent out there right now

[00:03:01:06]that can edit the final show product and in automatically.

[00:03:08:07]You will need a subscription to that. You need

[00:03:09:23]a Max one because this is running the agent.

[00:03:14:06]The lower subscription will not cover that.

[00:03:17:05]You will need a Max account and you also need a video editor.

[00:03:22:23]I highly recommend DaVinci Resolve for this.

[00:03:25:17]Because your agent can actually go right into that app and script,

[00:03:31:12]edit through interfacing with DaVinci Resolve directly.

[00:03:37:10]That is two other prerequisites that you need.

[00:03:42:00]Those are not affiliated with me or Fiction.show or the Studio.

[00:03:48:01]You will need to get those separately.

[00:03:51:01]If you have Premiere, something like that, you

[00:03:54:05]can ask the agent, ask Astra to get you there

[00:03:59:09]and figure out how to edit that. It's likely possible.

[00:04:03:16]I just haven't tested it, but it does work with DaVinci Resolve.

[00:04:08:13]That is everything you need to get going.

[00:04:11:09]Once you have installed the app, you will be met with the project picker scene.

[00:04:21:07]Once you are inside the app, the very first thing you will see is this screen.

[00:04:24:24]You will be able to create a project you will need to sign in.

[00:04:29:24]This isn't the first thing. There is a sign in screen.

[00:04:32:16]You will need to enter your email address

[00:04:34:21]and your password that you created on the site.

[00:04:38:13]Once you are signed in, you can manage your subscription.

[00:04:41:16]You can switch accounts. If you have more than

[00:04:43:01]one account, you can sign out. You can refresh.

[00:04:46:02]Here is where you would create a new project or open an existing project.

[00:04:51:07]When you create a new project, it will ask if you want continuity mode or realism.

[00:04:58:15]This is a choice that you need to make up front, but

[00:05:01:11]if you decide you want to go in a different direction,

[00:05:03:13]you actually can switch back and forth

[00:05:05:04]between these. They are just slightly different.

[00:05:08:11]These two modes, they function similarly. They have very similar interfaces.

[00:05:17:02]The main difference is that this one is better for models that go up to 15 seconds.

[00:05:24:20]This is better for budget models. This will really

[00:05:27:20]keep lesser ability models on track to a very high quality

[00:05:33:09]so that their output is still very high quality.

[00:05:37:23]The realism mode, this one is better for the models that go up to 30 seconds.

[00:05:43:16]This is going to be the frontier models.

[00:05:47:08]This one works with storyboards. Storyboards

[00:05:50:23]keep the continuity and the models on track.

[00:05:54:11]This one does not work with storyboards. This actually

[00:05:56:23]goes video to video to video or image to image to image.

[00:06:01:13]It will slice out images and carry the

[00:06:04:05]continuity as you go. Both of these will actually,

[00:06:07:03]but this one does not start with storyboards.

[00:06:10:18]The acting in this will often be more realistic.

[00:06:13:16]However, these are the more expensive models for the most part.

[00:06:18:00]These are models where if you need it to be solid and you

[00:06:22:06]need it to be cheap, this is where you're going to want to be.

[00:06:25:18]This will bring better performances, but

[00:06:29:04]typically more expensive and up to 30 seconds.

[00:06:32:15]You can try both of them and you can even go back and forth between scenes and see

[00:06:38:15]which one ends up better for what you need.

[00:06:42:20]You will need to choose what folder to go in and then name your project.

[00:06:51:22]I'm just going to name this test project 50 because I've had a lot of them.

[00:06:56:23]Once you create your project, you will come to this scene, to this scene, this tab.

[00:07:04:23]All the tabs are up top here and it will not let you pass

[00:07:09:09]into the rest of the tabs until you fill out these initial ones.

[00:07:14:02]This is a Bring Your Own Key app.

[00:07:17:09]That means that everything you do here is

[00:07:20:10]actually bringing keys from other providers.

[00:07:24:13]You're not paying me directly with this app.

[00:07:29:02]You're bringing your keys from other providers.

[00:07:31:22]That is a little bit technical. If you're not sure how to

[00:07:34:08]do API keys, you will go to any of these provider sites.

[00:07:43:05]You will sign up for an account with that provider.

[00:07:46:20]Then you will look in the account section and look for two sections.

[00:07:52:10]Actually, three sections are relevant. You need to look for where to add a balance,

[00:07:57:14]where to, it'll say, like, API keys or get key, and then your usage section.

[00:08:05:00]You want to add a balance first. I suggest very low, like maybe $10 to $20 to start

[00:08:12:01]until you know that that's a provider you want to stay with.

[00:08:16:14]Add a balance and then go to the API key. When

[00:08:20:20]you copy an API key, you will only see it once.

[00:08:25:11]Put it in a safe place. A password manager is a really good idea.

[00:08:30:14]Get that key. If you are wanting to put in a model or in a provider here, one of

[00:08:40:07]the best providers that has all the text models is OpenRouter.

[00:08:46:08]Getting an account set up at OpenRouter is a very good idea.

[00:08:49:21]You can copy their API key after doing that simple setup there.

[00:08:56:12]Then you will paste it in here and then it will show a check mark.

[00:09:00:05]It's showing a check mark for all of these because I have all of these keys in.

[00:09:04:09]You can also get accounts directly through Anthropic and through OpenAI.

[00:09:08:21]If you get any of these, I suggest

[00:09:11:05]OpenRouter or Anthropic because most of the parsing,

[00:09:16:12]most of what's happening when it's going to

[00:09:18:13]pull your story out will be with either...

[00:09:23:08]It will mostly be with Claude models.

[00:09:28:01]Then what your agent runs is different.

[00:09:30:18]This is all... Everything that's happening in the app is with API calls.

[00:09:37:15]If you're not sure what that is, that is when your app

[00:09:42:02]talks directly to an AI provider and pulls back the result.

[00:09:48:00]That's everything that's happening in the app side of it is with API calls.

[00:09:54:15]Your Codex or your Claude subscription is totally different.

[00:09:58:18]We'll get to that.

[00:09:59:15]What you need to set up here is you need at least one provider for text.

[00:10:04:19]I do recommend either Anthropic or OpenRouter.

[00:10:08:06]OpenRouter is probably the best choice.

[00:10:12:04]You do not need to mess with this.

[00:10:16:19]Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the most heavily tested model.

[00:10:20:22]This is what's going to be taking your story and chunking it into...

[00:10:27:12]If you're bringing a book, it will turn it into a screenplay.

[00:10:31:13]It does other things in the app background like figuring out where the costumes go,

[00:10:36:16]figuring out what your character's locations and your objects are.

[00:10:39:19]That's what's happening here.

[00:10:42:09]I recommend keeping this with Claude Sonnet 4.6.

[00:10:47:10]This is the most heavily tested, but you can use any of these.

[00:10:51:05]You can change this here. Just know that these are not heavily tested.

[00:10:55:03]This is the most heavily tested.

[00:10:57:19]You need an image provider.

[00:11:03:21]These are all large and fairly well-known API providers.

[00:11:12:02]If you are planning to run videos with Seedance,

[00:11:16:06]I suggest WaveSpeed, Atlas Cloud, and Kie.ai.

[00:11:24:04]These are less filtered.

[00:11:25:23]You will run into content filters less.

[00:11:28:13]That actually does matter because some of these will refuse photorealistic inputs.

[00:11:36:22]What you're doing is fine,

[00:11:38:19]but the content filter is so strict that it will not even let you do what is fine.

[00:11:44:24]You can have a different provider for images than video.

[00:11:51:08]If you choose one here,

[00:11:53:07]like if I choose this Kie.ai,

[00:11:55:20]it will change it for both of these unless

[00:11:58:02]you change a different one for the video.

[00:12:01:11]Same thing with these.

[00:12:03:13]You will choose one.

[00:12:05:08]It will ask you for the API key.

[00:12:07:22]Every provider is a little bit different.

[00:12:10:02]I'm not going to walk through every provider,

[00:12:11:13]but it's basically the same steps where you go on, you make an account,

[00:12:15:11]put a little bit of balance in, get an API key,

[00:12:19:00]and then once you put this in here and start generating,

[00:12:24:12]keep an eye on your usage just on that site.

[00:12:29:01]You can see how much you have spent and how much things cost,

[00:12:33:03]and that just helps you get an idea of what's going on.

[00:12:37:03]Here, I chose this provider here.

[00:12:41:04]You do not need to change this if you don't want to,

[00:12:47:04]but I have it set at GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst,

[00:12:51:18]which is the brand new model, and it's very, very good.

[00:12:54:15]I recommend this one.

[00:12:56:04]This is what is going to be used for storyboards

[00:12:59:04]and generating all your character assets and location assets.

[00:13:04:02]I would keep these on default, 2K image provider quality.

[00:13:09:22]You just let that be.

[00:13:11:24]Some providers will let you change this, others will not.

[00:13:15:10]This Kie.ai does not let me change image quality,

[00:13:19:01]it's just not going to let me change that there.

[00:13:22:19]You choose your video provider if you want it separate from your images.

[00:13:26:08]If you were just doing this for the first time,

[00:13:28:05]I would just pick one and let them be both the same things.

[00:13:33:16]You only have to get two keys and two accounts.

[00:13:37:18]Audio is optional in the realism mode that uses the really rigorous

[00:13:44:11]30-second models.

[00:13:46:01]You can get character voices, which will carry continuous audio automatically,

[00:13:54:03]but when you do that, it sometimes makes it a little less quality performance.

[00:14:00:24]That is optional, and I'll show you where to turn that on and off later.

[00:14:04:16]You can choose all of these, and then you will hit continue

[00:14:10:02]once you have that set up.

These notes reflect the September 12, 2026 recording. Features, model choices, prices, and interface labels may have changed. Adaptable prompts are templates, not transcript quotations.

[00:00:00:05]Here, you will need to choose, are you making a vertical drama?

[00:00:05:00]Are you making a short horizontal drama?

[00:00:07:06]Are you making medium horizontal or a feature film?

[00:00:13:00]What you choose is really important here

[00:00:16:04]because it affects how your story is parsed out.

[00:00:19:24]If you choose vertical drama, if you input a book,

[00:00:23:13]it will chunk that book into vertical drama episodes.

[00:00:27:07]If you put in a feature film, it will

[00:00:30:01]convert a book into a feature film screenplay.

[00:00:33:10]Or if you, this is the one I would choose if you

[00:00:36:00]were literally importing a feature film screenplay.

[00:00:39:16]You can hit this and then you can choose

[00:00:41:22]screenplay on the next screen when you import your file.

[00:00:47:10]All of this, too, is I'm showing you how the app works,

[00:00:51:24]but I want you to know how the app works,

[00:00:53:17]but you will not actually be using this that much

[00:00:56:07]because we're going to be driving it in the agent,

[00:00:58:14]but you need to know how it works so that you know

[00:01:02:02]where things are if you need to go looking for them.

[00:01:05:15]So this is, we're going to choose vertical drama and continue.

[00:01:09:23]Here, I would choose a file, and this is

[00:01:13:17]actually where I am going to go into another project

[00:01:17:19]so I can show you how this works once everything has been going through.

[00:01:26:04]I set up the keys. I set up the project as a vertical drama in this project.

[00:01:32:04]Source file, you can choose PDF or docx,

[00:01:37:03]and you can choose PDF or docx, and you would choose that file.

[00:01:44:23]If it's a book, you'll hit book. If it's a screenplay, you'll hit screenplay.

[00:01:49:05]If it's a book, it will take it and translate it

[00:01:51:20]into a screenplay automatically in the background.

[00:01:55:05]If it is a screenplay, it will not touch your

[00:01:58:02]screenplay, but it will break it into scenes

[00:02:01:08]so that it's much easier to manage than one big screenplay.

[00:02:05:24]So here is where there's a little drop down here.

[00:02:11:01]You can go assets plus story, which is, that is the

[00:02:15:12]default, and that's what you want if it's a totally new project.

[00:02:19:08]If for whatever reason you need to replace your assets, you can redo them just the

[00:02:24:21]assets or redo them, redo just the story if it didn't work for whatever reason.

[00:02:30:12]If you want to do it with a different model or something.

[00:02:34:08]There is a little advanced thing here, and

[00:02:37:08]this is, there's different versions of prompts.

[00:02:42:04]This, you're not going to need this to start with, but as

[00:02:45:13]I'm developing this, I am constantly retuning the prompts.

[00:02:49:03]So make a note of what version the prompts are. If you really get it going well.

[00:02:56:10]And then if I start tuning it later and you're like, oh

[00:02:59:04]no, this is slightly off from the system that worked for me,

[00:03:01:20]you can actually go back to a previous version of the prompt.

[00:03:06:15]So this is showing, I imported a vertical screenplay and it went through here.

[00:03:15:22]And what happens next is once you hit extract, it'll send your story info to

[00:03:24:13]characters, locations and objects and costumes.

[00:03:27:14]And while it's doing that, it will also send it to story.

[00:03:30:12]So it is converting into a screenplay in the

[00:03:33:14]background or parsing your screenplay out into scenes.

[00:03:38:02]This is a vertical drama, so this was broken into episodes.

[00:03:43:15]And it is running this, running, running your, pulling out

[00:03:48:15]what your characters and your locations and your objects are.

[00:03:50:24]It's not going to look like this to start.

[00:03:52:14]It'll actually show, it'll show like these cards

[00:03:55:20]with the information and it'll ask you to approve that.

[00:03:59:16]Which you can look at it as closely or not as closely as you want to.

[00:04:04:20]First thing, it will ask you for a style and you can choose any of these.

[00:04:10:08]These are kind of like more defaults, but there's also a lot more here.

[00:04:14:16]There's some animated ones. There are realistic styles.

[00:04:18:17]You can bring your own or you can make your

[00:04:22:05]own with whatever style you want to choose here.

[00:04:24:12]There is a dropdown here where you can pretty

[00:04:28:06]fine tune the type of medium, film texture, color.

[00:04:34:14]You don't have to touch this. The agent can do all of this for you.

[00:04:39:13]But if you want to, if you like this kind of control, you

[00:04:42:05]can go in here and change what type of look will be with.

[00:04:50:16]This will be added in several areas to help hone the look of your output.

[00:04:59:02]So I'm going to leave that off right now.

[00:05:03:13]And actually, I think that was on, so I'll let it be.

[00:05:09:17]In this screen, if you already have character references or other asset references,

[00:05:16:13]this is where you would choose your images.

[00:05:19:01]It will come up with cards and it'll ask you to assign them to the characters that

[00:05:23:19]it's already found as it's been pulling characters out.

[00:05:27:13]So here is where if you have rolled very unique looking characters in Mid-Journey

[00:05:33:08]or you already have assets that this is what your

[00:05:36:00]characters look like, here is where you can upload it.

[00:05:38:18]This will not be used as the main reference,

[00:05:40:14]but it will be used to create the main reference.

[00:05:43:15]So that is where you would put that here.

[00:05:49:09]These are the cards that it rolls.

[00:05:52:12]So this was the original image that I had used for a reference, and this is the

[00:05:59:18]full reference sheet that it rolled for this character.

[00:06:03:05]And it's pulling out all this information.

[00:06:06:13]When it's parsing in the background, it's pulling out who this character is.

[00:06:11:18]And when it rolls for the image, it's pulling that information in.

[00:06:14:24]Plus, if you don't have an image reference

[00:06:17:22]that you put in there, that's totally okay.

[00:06:19:11]It will read that information and it will make your character just from scratch.

[00:06:25:18]So it's giving different views.

[00:06:28:00]It is giving the color palette.

[00:06:29:10]It's giving different expressions.

[00:06:30:20]It's kind of baking some personality info in here, which I

[00:06:34:16]have found helps with the performances for these characters.

[00:06:40:22]And then usually it will roll two at a time, and then you approve one.

[00:06:44:16]So like this one rolled twice, and I approve that one.

[00:06:49:23]These will all--you will need to go through and

[00:06:54:13]tell it to generate if you are doing in the app itself.

[00:06:57:10]It doesn't start with this screen.

[00:06:59:10]It starts with a bunch of character rows where you

[00:07:03:10]can look at these kind of descriptions like this.

[00:07:09:08]And it starts with a bunch of these.

[00:07:11:13]You can look through them, but you don't have to.

[00:07:13:24]Actually, I've found that I prefer to just roll all the

[00:07:17:19]images and then see if it looks like what I have in my head.

[00:07:20:17]And if you don't like what it looks like, you can

[00:07:25:03]click on it, change the prompt here, and then hit rerun.

[00:07:29:17]But if you're running this with the agent, you are often just talking to the agent.

[00:07:33:21]But this is how you do it manually within the app.

[00:07:37:14]If you have your own, if you totally have your own reference and you do not want to

[00:07:42:01]reroll anything, you can upload that here.

[00:07:44:20]If there is a character that you are like, "This character does not need to be in

[00:07:50:03]this," you can just hit that, and it will be excluded from everything else.

[00:07:56:17]This is also where you would generate the voices if you want

[00:08:00:08]to voice cast in that way, but you don't have to voice cast.

[00:08:05:14]It's slightly more naturalistic if you don't, but if

[00:08:09:00]you do, it is more continuity within the voice itself.

[00:08:13:10]So this would be where you would roll this, and you'd listen to it, and if you like

[00:08:18:18]it, you keep it, and if not, then you can send it back and generate again.

[00:08:24:10]And you can change the voice prompt here too if that's not what you need.

[00:08:31:08]So you hit continue. For locations, it's pretty much the same process.

[00:08:36:09]It will roll either one or two location references. It's grabbing the description

[00:08:43:23]from your text again. It pulled it straight out of your text, and it will give

[00:08:49:06]different views of the location and a blueprint.

[00:08:53:03]These blueprints are not going to be exact, but they are

[00:08:56:05]helpful for blocking out the scene and directions later on.

[00:09:02:24]So if you like these, approve it. If you don't, rerun it.

[00:09:09:06]So these are the locations.

[00:09:12:02]Usually it will pull a lot of objects out of the text. I would only roll as many as

[00:09:21:04]are absolutely needed, like special objects.

[00:09:25:04]This is a pair of boots that is important to the

[00:09:28:13]story because the design is important to the story.

[00:09:33:01]This is an object that I wanted to have a specific thing, but this is not really

[00:09:38:17]specific. It doesn't super matter if it's not 100% from one scene to the other.

[00:09:44:16]So that one I might actually suppress.

[00:09:48:12]But the reason with that is when you are rolling your videos, sometimes the less

[00:09:54:05]amount of references in the video, the better.

[00:09:58:11]Because the model, when you get a whole lot of

[00:10:00:11]references, the model can get a little confused.

[00:10:03:00]So if I would have all of these things attached to one video, it would be not as

[00:10:07:18]good of a result as if I only had a very few.

[00:10:12:02]But these are ones that I chose for this project

[00:10:14:11]that I wanted to keep and keep as close as possible.

[00:10:20:08]So once you're done with that, you will go to costumes.

[00:10:23:10]Costumes, if you are doing this in the app and not in the agent, you will need to

[00:10:32:16]analyze the costumes and it will go through and pull

[00:10:35:13]out all of the costumes that are in your specific story.

[00:10:41:13]And it will use your original character

[00:10:44:05]reference as a reference to change just the costumes.

[00:10:50:15]It will try and keep the card exactly the same and it will just change the costume.

[00:10:55:19]And these will match automatically to your

[00:10:58:24]scenes once you have the story already parsed.

[00:11:06:03]So you almost want to have this run first, make sure this

[00:11:10:08]is all run, then come back and choose the Analyze costumes.

[00:11:16:01]And if something is, you just do not need it, then you just suppress it.

[00:11:23:05]And sometimes you will come up with costumes that it doesn't match automatically.

[00:11:27:02]You'll need to go through and choose which character that it does need to match to.

[00:11:32:02]So, and one thing you will see throughout the app is this content check.

[00:11:39:05]If you have stuff that is on the spicier or gorier side, you might want to turn

[00:11:44:24]this on because it will catch things before you'll

[00:11:47:10]get before you will get rejected at the provider level.

[00:11:52:04]However, it checks everything and it is a slightly extra charge every time you

[00:11:59:14]generate that it will check and rewrite prompts.

[00:12:05:00]It's there, but unless you have something that is very, unless you have something

[00:12:10:08]that needs it, I would leave it off personally, but it is there.

[00:12:14:05]It is there and you can use it.

[00:12:16:16]And I don't suggest coming at this with anything spicy or very gory.

[00:12:23:11]You'll probably want to get your AI to rewrite those parts or very much tone them

[00:12:29:23]down before you come at this, just because in the image generation, in the video

[00:12:36:07]generation, you'll just get a lot of provider bounces for content.

[00:12:40:07]And you just don't really want that. It's counterproductive.

[00:12:46:13]So continuing into the story area, there are

[00:12:50:13]a few controls here that you will need to use.

[00:12:56:17]Over here on the episode side, because this

[00:13:00:01]is a vertical drama, it's broken into episodes.

[00:13:03:01]It will tell you how many scenes are in each episode. Most of these just have one

[00:13:07:07]scene. A few of them have two, just because these are very short episodes.

[00:13:12:20]It will tell you approximately how long it thinks it

[00:13:15:10]is. In my experience, this is a little on the high side.

[00:13:20:12]So take this with a grain of salt. Your

[00:13:23:05]actual rolling time will be a little different.

[00:13:26:14]In the scenes area, you can go back and forth between scenes.

[00:13:31:08]This is in screenplay formatting. It should import everything into screenplay

[00:13:37:18]formatting. If you want to edit it, this is not editable as is.

[00:13:41:17]If you want to edit it, you can hit edit and then you can edit everything here. It

[00:13:46:11]does save in version. It auto saves and there is a version history.

[00:13:51:14]So you can go back and see your edits and you can restore that if you need to. You

[00:13:57:15]can go into an expanded mode where you can

[00:14:00:14]just do your writing here and collapse that again.

[00:14:06:00]And you can change the font. You can change this to Sarah. If you can go back to

[00:14:11:16]Curry, you can change the size. So all of that is changeable.

[00:14:16:21]There are two buttons here. You can restart the story prep. If you're looking at

[00:14:22:15]this and you're like, it is just not good, you can restart the story prep. I don't

[00:14:26:21]recommend doing that unless you go back to the key step and choose a different

[00:14:34:05]model to parse it. Otherwise, it'll come out very similarly.

[00:14:38:15]And quite honestly, I don't really recommend redoing the story prep here. If you

[00:14:42:21]have an issue with your script, this is where you will talk to the agent and be

[00:14:46:17]like, okay, this it didn't come out right. Go look at this and fix it.

[00:14:51:12]So this is where it becomes your screenplay though.

[00:14:57:07]Like this is a very short scene. So this is a longer scene.

[00:15:00:19]And here is where you can, there's two controls here, tag trailer scenes and tag

[00:15:07:04]social scenes. If you hit one of these, it will do an

[00:15:10:06]LLM call and it will go through all of your episodes and

[00:15:15:19]it will put little dots here for where it thinks the

[00:15:20:23]scenes are that would be good for a trailer or good for socials.

[00:15:26:15]It has slightly different criteria for both of those. So if you're doing those

[00:15:32:02]specific things, tag those separately. And I believe the

[00:15:36:16]agent can run that as well. So I'm just going to let that run.

These notes reflect the September 12, 2026 recording. Features, model choices, prices, and interface labels may have changed. Adaptable prompts are templates, not transcript quotations.

[00:00:00:13]And the video step, this is, if you are in realism mode, everything up to this

[00:00:06:23]point is mostly the same in both continuity and realism modes.

[00:00:10:22]And you can switch the mode here, but we are in realism mode and you can see it

[00:00:17:14]says realism 1.0 right here. So everything up to this point and here you can see

[00:00:25:02]that actually just finished here. These little blue dots

[00:00:28:01]are the scenes that it is saying would be good for a trailer.

[00:00:31:07]So if you're trying to make a feature film and you want to make a trailer, these

[00:00:36:06]would be the scenes that you would roll first and you can actually filter for that.

[00:00:40:18]So it just shows only those. Social will behave the same way.

[00:00:44:17]But when you're in the video, you can also filter for that just so you're showing

[00:00:49:02]the trailer. So, but otherwise you can just roll the whole

[00:00:52:13]thing and then come back and pull those trailer ones in later.

[00:00:56:04]In the video, there's some controls up top here that you need to know about. There

[00:01:00:24]is the content check again. I tend to leave this off. You will choose your video

[00:01:09:10]model here. In realism mode, there is only

[00:01:14:22]basically two models and one, two variations of one model.

[00:01:18:14]These are all the models that can do 30 seconds at a time. If you're in the

[00:01:21:19]continuity mode, you will get a lot more models.

[00:01:25:17]So you choose 480, 720, 108. I suggest, highly suggest testing at 480 just because

[00:01:36:16]it is way cheaper. And until you get a hang of this test low and then you can

[00:01:42:05]always go. You can always reroll it at higher resolution.

[00:01:48:12]And there is right here in the continuity references

[00:01:53:01]section for anyone who's used the app before this is new.

[00:01:57:20]You will probably want this set to both. This determines if it uses videos and

[00:02:03:19]carries them forward from video to video as references or images only. And then it

[00:02:09:16]will actually every video that rolls, it'll slice out

[00:02:12:18]parts of the video and carry those forward as images.

[00:02:17:22]Or both. I recommend both because I found that gives the best continuity. This is

[00:02:25:24]master scene references. That is what this is. You can toggle it off or on. If you

[00:02:33:01]have it on, I found it, it holds continuity a little better.

[00:02:37:15]If you have it off though, you might get more freedom in how it expresses things.

[00:02:43:11]So I would play with this, but leave it on to start.

[00:02:48:10]This is where when I was talking before about character audio samples, if you gave

[00:02:52:20]your character voices in this step and you just really want to keep those character

[00:02:57:24]voices steady across all the videos, turn this on.

[00:03:03:19]It is off by default because I personally prefer it without that. The voices might

[00:03:10:21]be slightly a little different from take to take, but I found they have more

[00:03:14:10]emotion when they do not have a specific voice reference that they are bound to.

[00:03:23:01]Here is where you choose if when it slices out a video like this and here I'll go

[00:03:29:01]here to show you. It will slice out a video.

[00:03:35:02]That had to load.

[00:03:38:22]When a video is done rolling, it will slice out frames. It will.

[00:03:45:15]And this actually was a bug that we fixed, but it

[00:03:47:16]will it will slice out one, two, three, four together.

[00:03:52:23]And that is carried into the continuity for the next video and it will also slice

[00:03:58:19]out the end frame. So you can choose here if you want four or eight.

[00:04:05:10]And this auto enhance here. If you turn this on, then every four moments and every

[00:04:13:07]every video I call a moment because it's got multiple shots within it.

[00:04:17:13]And beats is sort of a different frame of

[00:04:21:01]reference. So I'm just calling these moments.

[00:04:25:19]You can choose every X amount of moment videos to use a specific.

[00:04:34:17]Use a specific image model and then it will upscale it that that is a good idea if

[00:04:40:13]you were running this on automatic because as you go from video to video to video,

[00:04:46:03]sometimes it will lose a little bit of quality.

[00:04:48:14]It almost kind of gets a photocopy effect. So if

[00:04:51:03]you're using just video to video to video, you're using it.

[00:04:55:20]It will take your last video and put it in the reference for the next one and be

[00:05:00:03]like, continue this and then it will will continue with the prompt.

[00:05:04:18]So that is what that control is. And you don't have

[00:05:08:12]to have it on. I just found it helps with quality.

[00:05:13:03]In this whole area, there is a scene direction. You can do this. I don't recommend

[00:05:20:00]doing this by hand. This is more of an agent section.

[00:05:23:14]There are scene look overrides if a scene needs to be a different like if you have

[00:05:29:07]a dream sequence or if you have like a present

[00:05:33:20]narrative and a past narrative and they need to look different.

[00:05:36:04]That is where this would happen. I don't personally recommend doing this yourself.

[00:05:41:09]It's you just really don't need to let the agent do this.

[00:05:47:05]So when you are ready to get going here, you will plan your moments right here.

[00:05:52:06]This will say plan moments if it doesn't have moments like here.

[00:05:56:10]Generate moments from screenplay. Once you hit this, it will go through and make

[00:06:01:09]all of these make all of these prompts with the moment cards.

[00:06:07:20]I do not recommend rolling with this as is.

[00:06:11:21]Let it plan this out and then have the agent.

[00:06:16:03]There are skills that come with the app and there's there's

[00:06:19:12]five skills and one of those skills is a cinematography skill.

[00:06:22:15]So when your agent is looking over a scene, you will say roll the scene and plan

[00:06:30:08]the moments, which is basically like this.

[00:06:34:15]Make the master scene reference. You don't have to say this.

[00:06:36:21]You can just say make this episode and it knows to do this.

[00:06:41:14]It will make this and then you might ask it for the first time or two to run the

[00:06:48:16]cinematography skill over this episode before you roll it.

[00:06:52:14]And what that will do from the agent's perspective is it will look at everything

[00:06:57:18]here. It will determine if the timing is right. It will

[00:07:01:20]rewrite the different shots here to be more dynamic and cinematic.

[00:07:06:20]So I highly recommend that workflow versus just taking what the app says for

[00:07:13:10]granted. And that's why this is a two step part.

[00:07:16:19]Like you can run all of this in the app. You will get decent results, but you will

[00:07:20:02]get good results when you do it from the agent because the agent is smart enough to

[00:07:25:09]look at all of this and go, oh, here's how these three

[00:07:28:16]parts intersect and and we can pull out more resonance.

[00:07:31:22]We can pull out more cinematography.

[00:07:34:10]When you plan all of that, it will attach the different references that it decides

[00:07:40:10]goes with the scene and it will attach your master

[00:07:43:18]scene reference once that is rolled to everything.

[00:07:47:18]In here, you can see what references are attached to this master scene reference.

[00:07:52:23]It's showing like the in showing these three characters and

[00:07:56:02]the style guide. The style guide helps keep the look similar.

[00:08:00:17]And you can choose and this is what the costumes are for each of the characters.

[00:08:06:22]And so if something shows up wrong, you can go back and fix all of these. You can

[00:08:13:05]choose different things. You can also add a different

[00:08:15:14]reference and you can edit the prompt if you need to.

[00:08:19:09]Most of the time you're going to have the agent doing this. And if if something

[00:08:23:22]shows up wrong, just be like, that's not right. Go fix it.

[00:08:27:13]So that is how this all works here.

[00:08:34:12]Close the references and you if you're in the app and running this by the app, you

[00:08:40:20]can choose to run this automatically or step by step and approve each scene.

[00:08:44:23]If you hit run whole scene, it'll just sort of go through this whole process of

[00:08:48:17]rolling all of this. It's possible to run

[00:08:50:17]this automatically in the app without the agent.

[00:08:53:03]I don't advise it. You're going to get much better results

[00:08:56:06]with the agent. So on each moment card, there is a duration.

[00:09:03:04]The agent will set this because of how the agent works. And when I'm talking about

[00:09:08:09]the agent, I mean like Claude in Claude or or ChatGPT in the ChatGPT app.

[00:09:13:19]The agent will set this because of how the agent works. Sometimes when the agent

[00:09:19:02]sets things in your conversation, it will not set the same thing in here. So if you

[00:09:23:22]look in the app, you're like, oh, why does this

[00:09:25:11]say 15 seconds, but it rolled as a 30 second video.

[00:09:28:03]So every now and then it forgets to do that. So just keep that in mind. Here is

[00:09:34:14]where you would generate video if you need to generate it by hand.

[00:09:39:00]You can override what model it is right here or just leave it at the scene default.

[00:09:45:03]And it will show you the full generation prompt here, which all the other stuff

[00:09:50:22]that's tagged on that you don't see normally. It's like there's a lot more that

[00:09:57:14]goes into this than you might normally see.

[00:10:02:04]Your prompts themselves have tags on them. These are specific tags for the

[00:10:08:08]characters or the context. So everything is tagged automatically. But if you see

[00:10:15:19]something that is wrong and you're not sure how to fix it,

[00:10:18:10]it might be one of the tags was tagged for the wrong thing.

[00:10:22:10]It doesn't happen very often, but it's possible. So and here is where your

[00:10:28:06]references are. You can open each of these up. You can play the video. You can you

[00:10:35:00]can look at these. You can download them or you can if references. If you don't

[00:10:39:20]want a specific reference attached, you can just delete it.

[00:10:43:15]And then when you when your videos roll, they will be in here. So here is where

[00:10:48:04]when when I do roll with the agent, I come back in the app and look at what's the

[00:10:53:04]video look like every now and then if the agent says it's done rolling a video or

[00:10:59:11]when things are rolling, they will show up here in this job queue.

[00:11:03:02]Every now and then it will say it's done and you come and look and it's like, it's

[00:11:06:22]not there. That is something we've been trying to fix and it's we're having to

[00:11:12:05]chase it down. But if you go to another

[00:11:14:23]scene and come back again, it will be there.

[00:11:17:17]So and this is showing you when you see these, these are the automatic references

[00:11:25:19]that are added like this is the video before this

[00:11:28:17]is the last frame of the video before this is the

[00:11:34:03]Parched out reference and it won't look like

[00:11:36:10]this. We fix this. It'll just look like a grid.

[00:11:41:06]So then you just go through scene by scene. If you're doing it by hand, you would

[00:11:45:11]just go through scene by scene. If there is a white dot next

[00:11:48:16]to a scene. That means there are rolled finished videos there.

[00:11:53:04]If there is a hollow dot, that means there are prompts that have been planned the

[00:12:01:22]moment prompts have been planned, but there are no videos.

[00:12:05:00]So you can sort of look through your whole scene here and immediately know, okay,

[00:12:10:01]this has videos. This has videos. This has videos. This one does not. So that would

[00:12:14:16]be like the next one that you go to or these

[00:12:18:10]ones are planned, but the videos are not there.

[00:12:21:23]So that is how you navigate this in the sandbox. This is just this is where you go

[00:12:31:08]when you just want to roll something random. If you need to fix something. If you

[00:12:35:14]need to roll a random image if like if you're rolling a YouTube thumbnail, you can

[00:12:39:14]also ask the agent to do all this for you.

[00:12:41:24]So do the least amount by hand as possible. If you're running this with the agent,

[00:12:47:21]which you should be do the least amount of him by as possible.

[00:12:51:12]The agent has access to all of these controls. So if something is off, you can be

[00:12:55:15]like change the color of this outfit, go fix it

[00:12:59:05]and it will grab on to all of this and fix it.

[00:13:03:01]Media library is where you download everything. But again, the agent does this for

[00:13:09:02]you. So if you are rolling with the agent, you can be like download all my images

[00:13:13:21]for me or stitch my videos together, which the agent does automatically.

[00:13:19:16]The agent will when you are rolling a scene, the agent will roll all of the videos

[00:13:25:04]in that scene. It will pick the best pics out of that and then it will actually go

[00:13:31:01]take it and edit it and then present you the final thing.

[00:13:35:01]So the least amount by hand as possible. So

[00:13:38:19]these are all the main controls and sandbox.

[00:13:43:08]This basically just functions how most of the video and image generators function

[00:13:47:20]on the web. It just has very basic controls with the difference that you can hit

[00:13:53:07]the plus button here and access video references for any specific scene.

[00:14:02:17]I think you can access. Yeah, you can access the

[00:14:05:07]video references for any specific scene or you can access

[00:14:11:18]the image references, believe. Yeah. If you are on, you need to be on a references

[00:14:17:01]to video model. You can access just any of the references, any of your characters,

[00:14:22:16]locations, anything. So you're not going to have to be uploading things here, but

[00:14:25:19]you can. You can also upload references to.

[00:14:30:23]The realism mode here shows you what this is. This is the agent queue. When the

[00:14:35:13]agent is working, you will see everything

[00:14:37:13]that the agent is working on in this queue.

[00:14:41:07]This is the job queue. So if you are doing things on your own manually, what you're

[00:14:47:10]doing will show up here. You can change light mode to dark mode.

[00:14:53:12]And here is this is where you switch modes back and forth. I don't recommend

[00:14:58:24]bouncing back and forth often. Like if you need to test it, do the testing, but it

[00:15:03:17]is slightly different. And I'll briefly show you the continuity.

These notes reflect the September 12, 2026 recording. Features, model choices, prices, and interface labels may have changed. Adaptable prompts are templates, not transcript quotations.

[00:00:00:18]But I want to show you settings first. So in the gear icon here is settings.

[00:00:06:16]A lot of this here is similar to that initial key step. It's kind of doubled from

[00:00:14:08]there. But the really important part here is this agent server MCP. If it is not

[00:00:21:09]on, you will flip it on. If you have never set up an MCP before, your best bet is

[00:00:28:15]to hit set up automatically. But first you want to choose.

[00:00:34:07]You want to choose if you're working in Claude Code, Claude Desktop, ChatGPT

[00:00:38:02]Desktop. If you're running Astra, which is the one I recommend, you will be in Chat

[00:00:43:07]GPT Desktop. So you will click that. But you can choose any of these.

[00:00:48:11]And if you have never set up an MCP before and you hit set up automatically, this

[00:00:54:10]should write a config file directly into where it looks for MCPs and it will pick

[00:01:01:24]it up the next time you open up your app. If you have MCPs already, don't do this.

[00:01:08:04]It should refuse it. If you refuse to add anything

[00:01:11:22]to your files automatically, but just don't do that.

[00:01:15:04]If you're not technical, copy this.

[00:01:17:21]It says copy ChatGPT Desktop, Codex, setup guide. So you

[00:01:21:23]will copy that and you will go over to your agent. This is ChatGPT Desktop app.

[00:01:30:12]I don't run it on ChatGPT. I run it on Codex because this is the more technical

[00:01:36:18]one. It does have more access and it is a little bit more technical. However, it is

[00:01:42:11]the best at running a workflow like this. So you want this on Codex.

[00:01:46:22]And then I would paste in that setup prompt is directly from there. And this gives

[00:01:55:15]the AI agent everything it needs to set up your MCP.

[00:02:02:02]If you need to change any of your API keys, this is where

[00:02:05:18]you can do that. But you can also do that in the key set setup.

[00:02:10:15]This is basically your account controls, same as like the home screen. If you want

[00:02:16:05]to check for app updates, this is where you would check for app updates.

[00:02:20:16]The appearance section, you actually you can there's several different appearance

[00:02:25:00]types that you can change it. They're pretty subtle.

[00:02:28:03]But if you like the colors, this is where you can do that.

[00:02:31:16]You can change light and dark here again.

[00:02:35:15]I don't you don't really need to mess with anything here. There is another studio

[00:02:41:06]mode, which was like the original app. If you see that you don't really want to use

[00:02:46:23]that. It's old and it's it's basically only

[00:02:49:19]still there for the people who are still using that.

[00:02:52:09]Or have projects in that so that they don't break. So

[00:02:56:01]just leave that off. You don't need to mess with this at all.

[00:03:00:21]This is an important part. The prompts every single prompt in this app is you can

[00:03:06:01]see it and you can edit it and you can make your own versions.

[00:03:10:12]You can put in your entire you can put in an entirely different prompt if you want

[00:03:14:12]to. However, be aware that some of these things like

[00:03:17:13]especially like the conversion like for the story things.

[00:03:20:22]If you completely change the prompt, you might break it. So you won't break the

[00:03:26:16]app, but the prompt itself, it just might not work in the process. So especially

[00:03:32:19]with things that are like the system itself, like the asset extraction.

[00:03:39:02]You'll want to be careful dealing with this. However, you can you can change it. So

[00:03:43:21]it's like this. I don't like black box systems. I like to be able to customize it.

[00:03:48:20]If there is something that is not working for

[00:03:50:17]me. So this is where you would do that. If you.

[00:03:55:15]It shows all the story prompts here, all the video prompts and all the image

[00:03:59:23]prompts. And so if you want to change what a character

[00:04:04:06]sheet does, if you want it to behave in a different way.

[00:04:07:06]If you want it to always have like a Pixar style or something something like that,

[00:04:12:03]you can edit this and then save it as a new version.

[00:04:15:17]Anything you change in this screen will always override anything like you're able

[00:04:22:11]to choose what versions of prompts. Like I

[00:04:24:16]said, I'm constantly iterating on these prompts.

[00:04:27:15]Your saved versions will override that. However, because this is an app that is

[00:04:33:21]constantly being built on. I would always if you

[00:04:38:00]have prompts that work really well for you, save them.

[00:04:41:08]Save them and back them up and keep them separate because anything the golden rule

[00:04:46:16]of anything that you work with agents is save everything and back everything up so

[00:04:53:07]You will want to do that and you can export all of your prompts as well. So

[00:05:00:12]utilities, you really won't need this unless for a very few edge cases, but it's

[00:05:05:13]there if you need it. So that is basically the app itself.

[00:05:10:09]I do want to briefly show you the continuity mode. So if I switch this to the

[00:05:14:03]continuity mode, it shows continuity 2.0. If you are

[00:05:19:11]someone who has used this app before you can go to source file.

[00:05:24:09]And upgrade your project from continuity 1.0 to continuity 2.0. And the reason you

[00:05:31:00]would want to do this is because the costumes are way better in continuity 2.0.

[00:05:36:12]And it has some better controls to it. So you will want to upgrade your project.

[00:05:42:17]But other than that, the only thing that's really different between these modes is

[00:05:47:09]that this one does not go video to video to video. It

[00:05:51:12]actually let me actually get a continuity project here.

[00:06:01:05]Okay, this is the same project and we were testing it in continuity mode. It will

[00:06:04:23]have the same master scene references, but the difference here is that it will

[00:06:09:15]always roll a storyboard and it will take your original characters and make this

[00:06:15:06]board that shows all the different steps in your scene.

[00:06:19:15]I have found that the likeness isn't as strong if you do it this way. Like you will

[00:06:27:08]get a little bit more variation in the likeness. It's stronger if you're working in

[00:06:30:15]realism mode. However, if you are working,

[00:06:33:16]you have a lot more choice of models here.

[00:06:35:14]You can do grok, you can do Kling, you can do

[00:06:41:08]the various Klings, you can do Gemini, Omni.

[00:06:45:14]If you are working in the continuity 2.0 mode, I would suggest using either Seedance

[00:06:51:01]2.0, Seedance 2.0 Fast, or Minimax H3, whether it's the

[00:06:57:19]original or the Max version. The Max version is a bit better quality.

[00:07:02:19]These models will work very well with the system. They follow storyboards very

[00:07:07:14]closely without letting the storyboard override the model itself.

[00:07:14:01]I would not use Seedance 2.5 with this continuity and storyboard flow because it

[00:07:20:06]actually follows the storyboards too

[00:07:22:07]closely and it makes the performances more rigid.

[00:07:26:09]My favorite model to use with this mode is Minimax H3, which is...

[00:07:33:03]Actually, I'm on the wrong provider for that.

[00:07:37:03]If you use Minimax H3, it is solidly good

[00:07:43:01]performances at a much lower budget than the Seedance 2.5.

[00:07:48:09]If you're wanting to roll for budget, I would use Minimax H3 on the 768p or 2K.

[00:07:58:14]Or, Seedance 2.0 Fast at 480p is a very good budget option as well.

[00:08:05:15]It has similar controls where you can use the

[00:08:10:08]continuity references to auto-enhance these.

[00:08:18:01]This is where you're going with this and it will

[00:08:23:04]auto-slice these and put them into the next version.

[00:08:27:22]Again, you're not going to really be messing with this at much at all.

[00:08:33:04]Now that I've showed you all of that, once you

[00:08:36:19]have set all of this up, verify that your MCP is good.

[00:08:40:09]Once this is all set up and it says it can see the MCP,

[00:08:44:09]you might need to shut off the app and restart it again.

[00:08:47:15]Sometimes you need to do that and then go back

[00:08:49:06]into your chat again and say, "Can you see the MCP?"

[00:08:52:21]It will be like, "Yes" or "No."

[00:08:56:02]If it's "No," you might need to troubleshoot. Just ask it.

[00:08:59:21]Ask it to fix it. Ask it to look. Ask it what's going on.

[00:09:03:23]Once you get to the point where it says, "Yes, I see

[00:09:07:22]the MCP," and you might even need to start a new chat.

[00:09:11:05]Sometimes MCPs work a little finicky for me and it's like, "You need a new chat."

[00:09:15:19]I go start a new chat and like, "Can you see this MCP for this app?"

[00:09:22:11]If you do need to start a new chat, ask the original one.

[00:09:26:02]Say, "Write me a handoff prompt to give to a new chat so it knows what's going on."

[00:09:32:12]Then copy that in there and then go from there.

MCP setup instructions below are updated for Studio 1.5.10. The video and transcript show the September 12, 2026 layout; other notes reflect that recording.

[00:00:00:06]Once you get an agent that is connected to the MCP,

[00:00:06:06]here is where this is the workflow that I recommend.

[00:00:11:07]I recommend giving it--this is one chat that I've been rolling these episodes in.

[00:00:18:22]You will basically give it your story or your screenplay.

[00:00:26:17]You will drag and drop it straight into the chat or you can attach the files here.

[00:00:32:03]You will take that directly in there. If you

[00:00:35:03]are giving it a screenplay, that is also a book.

[00:00:37:18]If you have converted your screenplay in another AI

[00:00:40:24]or you have written your own screenplay from a book,

[00:00:44:22]give it both and ask it to put the screenplay in as the story part and parse the

[00:00:51:08]characters and everything from the book itself.

[00:00:53:11]That actually does have more information in it than most screenplays.

[00:00:58:17]If you only have a screenplay, just give it the screenplay and roll with it.

[00:01:01:10]If you only have a book, give it the book and

[00:01:03:11]ask it to make it into a screenplay within the app.

[00:01:06:19]You will give that first and it will kind of chug

[00:01:11:03]and chug and say, "It's doing this. It's going at it."

[00:01:15:01]It will run in a guided mode at first. I recommend going in guided until you really

[00:01:23:18]get a flow for this because everything that it does is spending money.

[00:01:27:23]Every image it rolls is spending money.

[00:01:31:01]Every video it rolls is spending money from

[00:01:33:16]those API providers that you initially put in there.

[00:01:38:08]It will initially start parsing everything out, putting

[00:01:43:09]your screenplay in there, getting it converted if it needs to.

[00:01:47:01]It will start rolling out.

[00:01:51:14]It will ask you about the style guide first. It will do that first.

[00:01:56:11]Here's where you go into the app and then you choose which style guide you like.

[00:02:01:16]You don't have to choose any of this.

[00:02:04:01]It will often just run on its own. Just let it be. It will roll a style guide and

[00:02:09:19]it might be like, "Oh, you need to approve this."

[00:02:11:15]You go in here and it will give you two choices. You

[00:02:13:10]approve one and then you just go back and let it keep going.

[00:02:17:12]It might get to the part where it has all your character cards. It's like, "Okay,

[00:02:21:17]you need to go in and then choose which of

[00:02:23:21]these you want and then you approve it and move on."

[00:02:26:24]You can tell it, "Roll all my character's locations and then objects and costumes."

[00:02:32:17]Or if you want to approve the characters first, be like, "Your characters, objects,

[00:02:37:16]and locations. Roll all of those and then stop and then

[00:02:42:08]notify me or let me know and I'll come back and look at it."

[00:02:47:00]You can walk away for like 20 minutes, half an hour, come back, and all your

[00:02:50:24]characters, locations, and objects will be there and you will be able to roll them.

[00:02:56:03]When you are rolling this, you must have those skills installed.

[00:03:04:09]When you originally downloaded it, you

[00:03:06:16]downloaded an app and you downloaded the skills.

[00:03:09:10]If you have not installed the skills yet, here would be the part where you drag and

[00:03:14:05]drop the folder that you downloaded with the skills

[00:03:16:13]into the agent and say, "Install these as skills."

[00:03:20:11]If you know how to install skills on your own, that is usually in the settings. You

[00:03:27:18]can put them in the settings, you can install skills and plugins.

[00:03:31:03]If you know how to do that, just drag it in for the

[00:03:34:12]agent and be like, "This is what we're going to use."

[00:03:38:20]A skill is a specific set of instructions for a specific task. This app actually

[00:03:45:10]has five skills. It has one to tell the agent how to

[00:03:49:13]interface with the app and what everything does in the app.

[00:03:53:02]It has a skill to ingest your book so it knows how to go through that process.

[00:03:57:24]It has a cinematography skill that will help it assess what the app does

[00:04:03:18]automatically and then fix it and make it better or

[00:04:06:22]identify problem areas and just generally enhance everything.

[00:04:11:01]It has a story overview skill. If the app just converted your book to a screenplay,

[00:04:19:13]I would ask the agent to use the story overview

[00:04:22:07]skill to go through and look at everything and find.

[00:04:27:06]It pulls out resonance. It pulls out continuity. It gives itself a bunch of

[00:04:33:09]reference documents that it can use to fix problems later.

[00:04:38:12]There is a fifth skill that is the editing skill. That is what it will use if you

[00:04:45:18]have DaVinci Resolve installed to go in and edit the

[00:04:49:18]final cut. This is a final cut that it edited for me.

[00:04:56:09]This is actually two clips put together and slightly trimmed to be an edited

[00:05:00:09]version that it edited in DaVinci. This is the output.

[00:05:05:12]You actually don't have to go in the app at all if you are using this. You can do

[00:05:10:09]it entirely here. You can just ask it. Show me all the characters here and I will

[00:05:13:19]approve it. Show me all the locations here and I will approve it.

[00:05:16:11]It will surface things like this. It will show you the videos in the chat.

[00:05:20:12]I still like to go in here because it is easier to go in here and hit approve.

[00:05:27:19]Once you have rolled all your characters, locations, and objects, that is when you

[00:05:33:19]roll the costumes. As long as the story has already been gone through, you do the

[00:05:38:06]costumes. It will do that. Just ask it to go to the costumes.

[00:05:42:04]When you get to the first scene, it will

[00:05:47:05]generate the master scene reference like this.

[00:05:54:06]I am going to go back to the realism. I need a different project.

[00:06:00:01]It will go back to... It will generate this master scene

[00:06:05:17]reference. It should show you that within the chat as well.

[00:06:08:18]When you are rolling your first video, go slowly. Take it step by step. Make sure

[00:06:16:18]it is what you want. Make sure there are any issues.

[00:06:20:03]For the first couple of scenes that you do, ask your agent to keep a log of your

[00:06:25:17]decisions, anything that goes wrong, anything that you need fixed, anything in your

[00:06:30:10]project specifically that you are finding is an issue.

[00:06:34:16]If you are doing something with sci-fi, your character's eyes need to be glowing

[00:06:38:16]consistently. That is something that the agent could

[00:06:41:10]check and every single shot are the eyes glowing consistently.

[00:06:45:08]Things like that. You want to keep a log and let the agent keep a log so that as

[00:06:51:18]you are going through things, it is learning. It is learning what you want. It is

[00:06:56:00]learning how you work. It is learning your

[00:06:57:14]style. It is learning what it needs to do.

[00:06:59:23]As you are going through video to video, if something rolls and it is not quite

[00:07:07:14]right and it shows you and you are like, "Ah, that is not it. Go back. Fix it. Here

[00:07:12:21]is what I want you to do differently this time."

[00:07:15:20]Or even just be like, "It is not right. Here

[00:07:18:00]is why it is not right. You figure it out."

[00:07:20:20]The agent is smart enough to pretty much figure that out. The agent might determine

[00:07:26:24]that something is wrong in the references, something is wrong with this, or it

[00:07:30:08]might need different things going on here. It can determine that.

[00:07:37:04]The agent will carry over continuity from scene to scene. If it doesn't, send it

[00:07:42:13]back. Say, "Pull that in. This is the same scene. Keep going."

[00:07:46:05]It is kind of a conversation. Once you really get that flow down and the agent is

[00:07:51:23]familiar with you and knows what you want and has that log that you are making

[00:07:56:10]alongside of things, that is when you can be like, "Okay, roll episode 3. It will

[00:08:03:11]go and it will do it and it is done. It may be

[00:08:07:13]perfect. I have had some perfect episodes out of this."

[00:08:11:04]Once you get that flow going on, there might be little things here and there that

[00:08:16:20]you might need to fix or cut or something. But you still don't have to do that.

[00:08:22:18]I had, I think in my scene 3 here, there was something in the middle of it where

[00:08:28:03]there was a cup that was just levitating in the middle of the air. That is not what

[00:08:32:01]that scene needed because that is not how it worked.

[00:08:35:09]I would tell the agent that cup right in the middle of there that we don't need

[00:08:43:00]that. Just cut that out. The agent is smart enough that it can do it. It will roll

[00:08:48:21]the scenes for you. If you install DaVinci

[00:08:53:18]Resolve, you don't even really have to be in it.

[00:08:59:01]So if you install DaVinci Resolve, you don't even have to be, you don't have to come in.

[00:09:04:09]If you don't know how to use DaVinci Resolve, that's okay.

[00:09:07:23]Basically, it can be an interface with the app only. If you do know how to use it,

[00:09:12:09]you can go through and tweak things yourself. But this is an Astra edit. This is

[00:09:17:06]something that Astra edited completely on his own.

[00:09:22:06]Astra actually, for this episode, determined that there should have been a

[00:09:25:19]flashback right here, went and rerolled this flashback completely on his own and

[00:09:30:09]put it in here, which is kind of amazing. That is how smart this agent is.

[00:09:36:23]The agent is able to make these creative calls and it will make it much, much

[00:09:42:12]better if it has worked with you through the initial scenes of the project or if

[00:09:46:20]you're going from project to project, has this running log

[00:09:49:15]of how you work and how you think and how you approach things.

[00:09:52:08]That is one of the things that you do need to spend some time and input and make

[00:09:59:08]sure you know how this works before you let it

[00:10:01:21]run overnight, before you let it run all day.

[00:10:04:04]I have had things run automatically and I didn't pay as much attention and it might

[00:10:13:16]not be usable at the end. If you're not sure of where it's going, check in

[00:10:19:17]periodically. You can actually access this on the ChatGPT app on your phone.

[00:10:24:16]If you are away or doing something else or I was doing this while I was cooking

[00:10:31:07]dinner tonight, you can watch it as it works in the

[00:10:36:16]remote section of the ChatGPT app and watch what it's doing.

[00:10:42:07]If you're looking at it and you're like, "Whoa, that's

[00:10:44:17]really not it," you may be like, "Stop, go back, fix this."

[00:10:47:24]You want to keep an eye on this. You do not want to just let this run completely on

[00:10:52:22]its own. It can do most of the work, but you still need to

[00:10:56:07]keep an eye on it, just like you would if you hired someone.

[00:11:03:16]If you hired someone, you would be checking every few

[00:11:05:23]episodes to make sure it's on track and it's still good.

[00:11:09:05]If you get in a good rhythm and it's just knocking out episode after episode after

[00:11:12:24]episode, you can probably let it go a bit more, but still check it.

[00:11:17:06]You don't want to just be spending lots and lots of money and not checking it and

[00:11:20:22]then you get to the end of it and you're like, "Oh, no, don't do that."

[00:11:26:08]I learned that lesson. Don't do that.

[00:11:29:00]You just want to ride herd on it throughout the day, but you can let it go for an

[00:11:35:21]hour at a time. Come back and be like, "Okay, these are the episodes. Did these

[00:11:40:02]work? What do we need to fix and how do we change it for the next ones?"

[00:11:44:20]Then you go off and do your stuff for another

[00:11:46:22]hour and then come back and then look at it.

[00:11:49:06]That's the rhythm we're going to be working with here.

[00:11:53:10]You can, once you have this rhythm going on, moments within a scene need to be run

[00:12:00:07]in order, but you can ask the agent to find all

[00:12:04:05]the scenes in here that start at different times.

[00:12:08:17]I have a bunch of scenes in this particular one that are all on the same location.

[00:12:13:18]Those all need to be run in order, but then I have one that starts the next

[00:12:17:11]morning. That does not need to be run in order.

[00:12:20:16]Not necessarily. One that's in the in yard. There's another one that's on the road

[00:12:27:23]outside of town. These could actually all be run simultaneously.

[00:12:32:18]You could have the agent running four or five different scenes at the same time

[00:12:37:18]once you know that the process is good and the

[00:12:40:07]agent is going to get it close to how you want.

[00:12:44:01]Then you could walk away and come back and you have four or five scenes to review.

[00:12:49:21]That's how you really start getting the output.

[00:12:53:15]That is basically the process with all of this. When you get to the end, you ask it

[00:12:59:06]to edit it. It's just a conversation. You are having a conversation with the agent.

[00:13:04:15]When you're starting, you're like, this is what I'm starting with. You walk through

[00:13:09:02]it. If something's wrong, say please fix it. You don't even know how to fix it.

[00:13:14:10]Just enough to know if something's wrong. The

[00:13:18:04]hair color is wrong. The eye color is wrong.

[00:13:20:08]I wouldn't worry about the tiny details, especially with verticals. If something is

[00:13:27:12]majorly off, then yes, go fix it. Or tell the agent to go fix it.

[00:13:32:09]The only other thing you really need to know here is if you haven't used this

[00:13:38:08]before, I would put this on approve for me. This will let the agent make most of

[00:13:45:04]the decisions on if something is potentially unsafe in your computer.

[00:13:49:19]When you're running this on your desktop, if you're in Codex mode, it is

[00:13:53:00]interacting with the files on your computer. That does carry a little bit of risk.

[00:13:58:05]However, if you have it on always ask for approval, you will be sitting here

[00:14:02:17]hitting approve, approve, approve every five seconds.

[00:14:05:16]You can't run it autonomously that way. If you are worried about it having access

[00:14:11:07]to your files, run this on a laptop or a computer

[00:14:16:07]or something like that where you run it on a spare.

[00:14:21:01]I'm just running this on my main machine. You can see I have everything on here.

[00:14:24:11]This is my main machine. I'm not worried about it. I've never had an issue. I'm

[00:14:29:01]careful. The agent is smart enough that I trust the agent.

[00:14:34:03]Also, I back everything up. In case anything would happen, I have everything backed

[00:14:39:06]up. That's kind of just general hygiene around using an agent. You know that the

[00:14:47:00]agent can mess up, so you just try to create an

[00:14:49:17]environment where if it does, it's not going to matter.

[00:14:52:18]Back your project up before every session. Back your prompts up. Back everything

[00:14:57:20]you're doing up. Then you're good. You can just let it run.

[00:15:02:04]Here is where you would add the files and everything. Here, there's a slider on how

[00:15:09:16]hard it thinks. I would keep it on high. You can run it medium and high. It's just

[00:15:16:05]fine. You do not need these extra modes.

[00:15:18:15]This will just spend your usage and tokens.

[00:15:23:06]I am on the $200 plan and I can roll a whole lot with that before it starts going

[00:15:30:21]down. You do have to watch your usage in here. You can check your usage here.

[00:15:40:02]This is what to keep an eye on. I have been

[00:15:43:08]hitting this all day and it's only gone down to like $77.

[00:15:47:05]If you are on the $100 plan, this will go down a lot faster. If you are doing this

[00:15:53:04]at scale, you're going to want the higher plan.

[00:15:56:23]If you're just doing this to start and just to try out, you're probably still going

[00:16:02:08]to want the $100 plan because if you're on the $20, it won't get you very far

[00:16:07:08]because the agent just takes time and that will just zip it right out.

[00:16:13:00]You don't need to pay attention to these. Often, OpenAI will give you resets. If

[00:16:17:09]you use your whole weekly limit, you can use a reset and keep going.

[00:16:22:12]I do not recommend buying credits because they

[00:16:25:02]are highly prorated and they will just slurp.

[00:16:29:15]If you just want to keep an eye on your usage, if this is going down too fast, you

[00:16:38:10]will probably just knock that down to

[00:16:41:00]medium. Astra on medium is still very, very smart.

[00:16:45:04]I keep it on high. That seems to be the best quality balance for me. You can run

[00:16:52:17]this in Claude as well, but Claude can't do the editing.

[00:16:58:09]I very much recommend using Astra for this because this is the only agent so far

[00:17:05:01]that is able to get itself into DaVinci and then just have at it with the editing.

[00:17:12:16]He can do the cuts, he can do the sound, he can get transcripts. I haven't even

[00:17:17:14]tested all that he can do. It's just a lot.

[00:17:20:21]That is basically the workflow. From here, this does not put music on it. There

[00:17:28:17]might be some music in the background that

[00:17:30:07]comes with the videos, especially Seedance 2.5.

[00:17:33:05]I would recommend getting the music from Suno or Mozart or to good AI music

[00:17:42:08]generators, something like that. If you have royalty music, you can use that.

[00:17:48:16]Wherever you get that from, just don't get it for free. You don't want to use that.

[00:17:54:22]But you can add the music in DaVinci yourself or you can give the agent the file

[00:18:02:15]and be like, "Give this the soundtrack. Here's the music."

[00:18:06:03]Again, as much as you can offload on your own, do that. That's pretty much the

[00:18:13:12]process. If you have any questions, ping me. Feel free to ping me.

[00:18:20:21]I hope you make lots of verticals and it's really, really fun. Good luck.

These notes reflect the September 12, 2026 recording. Features, model choices, prices, and interface labels may have changed. Adaptable prompts are templates, not transcript quotations.