Development and pre-production, compressed into one pass.

Structure before prose

Before a single line of narration is written, the stage resolves an act structure: cold open, premise, escalating evidence beats, reversal, resolution, forward hook. Each beat carries a target duration, so the runtime is a design decision rather than the accidental result of how much text was generated.

• Cold open capped at eight seconds — the retention cliff on long-form uploads
• Mid-roll re-hooks placed on beat boundaries, not fixed timestamps
• Close written to seed the next episode in the 30-video arc

The shot list is machine-readable

Each narration beat is paired with a shot entry carrying subject, framing, lens character, lighting intent, movement and grade reference. That entry is the exact contract passed to the stills and motion stages, which is why the finished cut still matches the approved document.

• Framing vocabulary: wide, medium, close, insert, aerial, macro
• Lens and depth notes expressed as focal-length intent, not adjectives
• Continuity keys so recurring subjects hold across shots

Edit brief for the timeline

Editing notes are authored for an assistant editor: cut points, transition type, sound-design cue, music energy and the reason for each choice. Nothing in the brief is decorative — every field maps to an operation later stages perform automatically.

Approval gate

No render credits are consumed at this stage. You read the dossier, cut episodes you do not want, and only then commit footage. Pre-production is where a production saves money, and the same rule applies here.