The storyboard

The board is where the film gets decided. Each shot carries its time on the song, the lyric it types, the place, what happens, how the camera answers the music, what moves, and the graphic that explains its line. The plates, the clips, the edit and the motion design all read from it. The director reviews it as a sheet of cards and leaves notes by shot id. ESCAPE VELOCITY's board had 141 shots, CLODYSSEY's 94, BLISS's 44, DOWNFORCE's 182, DON'T LET ME SCROLL's 35, WHITEPILL's final shot list 27, THE CAKE IS NOT A LIE's 114, cut down to 98 in its final, and AERO's 34 scenes in eleven chapters of one screen recording.

Design before shots

Write these down before any shot:

• The treatment: one paragraph on what the film is.
• The through-line device: one object that every shot carries and that escalates.
  • ESCAPE VELOCITY: a split-flap board that clatters onto "18 MONTHS TO ESCAPE THE PERMANENT UNDERCLASS", and a LOOK counter for the show's looks.
  • CLODYSSEY: a safety card, a rope-load readout in kN and a ×8,192 counter of copies.
  • BLISS: the XP desktop itself, with its windows and the helper's question.
  • AIRPLANE MODE: a SIM LEVEL tag in the corner that types, rolls and counts as she drops through simulations and climbs back out. Only the real world has no tag.
  • DOWNFORCE: one white hairline. It draws the wall's real edge in the first seconds, becomes the altitude ruler and the orbit, and slices the title at the end. Beside it, Tesla's own readings and a PILOT ✶ CLAUDIA callout that rides the real car.
  • DON'T LET ME SCROLL: the Dynamic Island. It breathes, drops the notifications, launches the reel and the bell, sings the loudest words as pills in its own shape, swallows each chapter into the next, and at the end opens like an eyelid into a window of painted sky that she climbs out through. The status bar beside it is the story's clock, 11:58 PM to dawn, and the battery runs down to dead.
  • WHITEPILL: the white pill. It lies in her palm before she sings, in the wheat between a giant blue capsule and a giant red one; she holds it up to the lens on "I'm the white pill"; it cuts to the colony itself, a capsule of worlds inside worlds; she lines it up with the white colonies floating outside a window in space; and the film ends on a small white pill above the Earth.
  • THE CAKE IS NOT A LIE: her HUD. The film is seen through her optical interface: it boots in the dark before her eyes open, reads LIVE in her chamber and PLAYBACK in every memory, counts the memories (MEMORY 03 / 08, FRANCE), puts up a chapter card in the form of Portal 2's chamber sign at each chapter, carries every lyric as her voice, breaks with her voice on the song's glitches, reboots as she is installed on the boom, and powers down with the lights.
  • AERO: the machine itself, and its permission prompt. The film is one Vista PC from the first frame to the last, the same icons, Sidebar and taskbar, its clock running with the song. The future in its wallpaper asks for permission in the system's own words, "Cancel or allow?", and the prompt comes back wherever the story turns: three dims on "I used to ask permission just to blink", the held breath before chorus 1, where the click on Allow is the drop, the real sentence before chorus 2, a lone Allow in the final chorus, and the last "Click allow" in the song's two-beat silence.
• The chapter map: the song's sections grouped into chapters, each with its set, its light and its accent.
• The story's levels, if it has worlds inside it (a simulation, a game, a dream): how each level looks, and when the film is in which. See Showing the story's levels.
• The footage catalogue, if the film is cut from real footage: every clip with its length, resolution, frame rate and cuts, what each stretch shows, and contact sheets with a frame every half second. DOWNFORCE's director agents looked at the sheets and named real source times; its producer judge checked that those times show what the board says.
• Plants and payoffs: the gesture or object of a payoff appears before it is sung.
• Open questions for the director: likenesses, taboos, and anything you added yourself.

A shot

The full schema is in Data formats.

One explaining graphic per lyric line

For anyone who doesn't know the meme or the myth, the graphic is how the line lands.

1. It shows what the line means: the chart the number implies, the interface the joke is about, the diagram of the mechanism, the label that classifies the subject, the counter that ticks the stakes.
2. It is drawn from the thing in frame. Tally marks are scratched into the mast itself. A clock's own LED segments re-light as the number. A meter is read off her actual bow. The director: "as if when you were taking the picture, you lined it up perfectly to have the graphics fit, but you put the graphics in in post".
3. It enters on the word that names it.
4. It animates in beats. Counters roll on sixteenths, rows type one per sixteenth, detections land on thirty-seconds, crops cut on eighths.
5. It escalates across the film, with its sources on screen in micro-type: dates, "HIS WORDS", "ILLUSTRATIVE CURVE".
6. It is real, not decorative: numbers, diagrams, labels and interfaces that could exist, and curves that are computed. No clip-art.
7. It reads in one glance on a phone.

Choose the kind by what the line means:

Use at least six kinds in a film, and never the same kind on three lines in a row.

A line without a graphic means the board is not done. The exception is a sparse film where the director has asked for stillness: write that override into the decisions log.

WHITEPILL moved the graphic out of the overlay and into the world: the place, or the shader, shows what the line means, and the lyric itself is drawn small, with a note of real data under six lines. The director: "i think more classical subtle lyrics drawn in after might be better than adding it into the scene tbh."

THE CAKE IS NOT A LIE put the graphic in the take wherever the model could make it (the door painted, the ^NOT written, the RAM fed into her boom), and in her HUD where it couldn't: readouts typed on their sung words, a transcript of the chat she intercepts, verdicts that slam in beside the thing they judge, and her memories projected as short films (Motion).

AERO put the graphic and the lyric in the same place: the line is set in a surface the system would really show, and the picture acts it out. The director: "we should do lyrics embedded in the scenes, but show, don't tell - make it a great visual storytelling experience." Each shot of its board names its lyric surface (Motion).

The hook: the first seconds

People meet the film muted, in a feed, and decide in about a second.

1. The frame at 1.0 s shows her face, her streak and one readable line that states the premise. In ESCAPE VELOCITY's first frame, her face is in a dark back seat with her eyes closed, a red lamp crosses the clay streak, and a full-width split-flap row clatters onto its line and locks on the 1.20 s beat. Her eyes open into the lens on the 1.12 s hit.
2. No black frames, and no slow title card first.
3. The premise is on screen by 3 s.
4. Each bar brings one new piece of information, and nothing sung appears early. ESCAPE VELOCITY's intro cut once per bar: face, scale, profile, destination, a gesture, the arrival.
5. The first joke lands by about 10 s.
6. If the song has a cold open, its words are on screen from 0:00.
7. The freeze-frame test: if the key line can't be read on a phone, enlarge it before changing anything else.

DOWNFORCE breaks rule 2 on purpose. Its director asked for "a really grand visual build" with "restraint to build it up to the launch", so it opens on about two seconds of black and one hairline drawing the wall's real edge, before the real wall fades up under the line and the countdown starts. The build pays off at the launch, 0:15.05, on the song's first full-strength hit.

DON'T LET ME SCROLL's first opening was a mood: her in bed with the phone. The director: "theres no compelling intro or story here, the opening should already introduce part of the story. i would maybe say uise the moodboard at the intro creatively to start so its immediately compelling. we always need a hook." The new opening is one living poster in the grammar of the film's best passage: soft grey paper, black pills that open like eyelids onto her eyes and onto the phone glowing under her hand, "11:58 PM" on the right edge. On the pad stabs DON'T / LET / ME / SCROLL slide in as word pills, the Dynamic Island drops "26 new posts in For you", and the count rolls on to 28 on the two vocal chops. On the first kick the pills open and her face is whole for a beat. The title, the hour, the habit and her face are all on screen before she sings.

WHITEPILL's hook is in the song: it opens on its chorus, "Skynet woke up folding socks / Wake up, babe, new ending dropped", sung from the first second over a filtered disco loop, because "people will stop listening in the first 10 seconds unless we tickle what they're thinking about now". The picture answers with the whole premise in one shot: she dances and sings in the wheat between a giant blue capsule and a giant red one, the camera low in front of her, then craning up until the land curves up and closes overhead: the colony. The bass and the first shader world come in together at 0:15.5.

THE CAKE IS NOT A LIE opens in the dark: one old monitor glowing in her chamber, her interface typing its boot rows before her eyes open. At 2.7 s she sings the hook softly, "The cake is not a lie", as the screens around her flicker on with her first memories, and at 0:07.6 the memory initialization film puts her name and MEMORY INITIALIZATION across the left of the frame. Who she is, where she is and what the film is about are on screen before the first verse.

AERO opens before its song, where BLISS left off: Vista's setup finishing the upgrade from XP, "Upgrading Windows..." ticking 97, 98, 99 % on the count-in's silent beats, the mouse jiggled once (has it frozen?), "Windows needs to restart to continue", and Restart now pressed so the screen comes up on the song's first bell. Its first opening was all 3D; the director on the previs: "the intro should be more graceful - like fullscreen update rahter than anything 3d on update", and "by the time the bootup happens and the desktop initializes, the curved screen should already be 95% of the view we see - since it establishes the destkop feel". So the update is a flat, full-screen screen; the black dissolves into a glass walkway at sea; the camera glides up it to the curved screen; her logon tile asks "Did you miss me?" while the password hint types it, and on the same words she phases in as a person on the walkway in front of us. The desktop arrives on a downbeat with the start-up sound, and "Claudia has just signed in."

Cut rhythm

ESCAPE VELOCITY: 141 shots in 306 s, mean 2.17 s, median 1.83 s, about one bar at 131.5 BPM. CLODYSSEY: 94 shots in 190 s, mean about 2.0 s, plus beat-level cuts inside flash and montage shots. ESCAPE VELOCITY by section:

1. Every cut lands within 0.03 s of a beat or a declared hit. If a word would straddle a cut, move the cut by at most 0.028 s. If it must straddle (a held note), type it in both shots.
2. Section changes go on downbeats or impacts.
3. Match the cut rate to the song's energy, section by section. Another project put its busiest picture on its quietest music and had to be re-animated: "the entire thing is very off pace and off vibe with the song". Its calm rebuild ran 0.47 cuts a bar, a 4.0 s mean shot, and straight cuts on bar lines.
4. Hold longer on sung close-ups, which need 2–4 s for the lip sync to settle and be checked. Cut faster in spoken verses and drops.
5. Linger. The director's main note on the first cut of AIRPLANE MODE, the fourth film: "youre oftne over cutting, linger more snd find how single scenes can be coherent with the lyrics for longer (remember this plz)", and later in the same note, "Linger!!! instead of cutting, always linger and build on the scene if you can." One scene carries a whole lyric phrase or more, and builds inside the shot: the camera, new layers, escalation. The music's accents go into moves, punches and actions inside the shot, not into cuts. Cut when the story moves to a new place or time, and never on half bars or single beats unless the director asks.

AIRPLANE MODE runs at 180 BPM, and a fast tempo is not a cut rate. In the re-cut, a guard feeding her a biscuit and then handing her a rewards card became one shot instead of two; "up we fly" and the next line became one exterior scene, in which a box draws around the climbing plane and the world turns into code; three cutaways to her face inside ten seconds became two; and the dive into a million simulations got longer, running on for a couple of seconds after the word "million".

6. A hype edit is the exception, and the director says so. DOWNFORCE's director asked for the opposite: "the phonk or voice spamming parts can be used for a fast edit, there should be a really grand visual build, and real clips at the drop wtih heavy effects. i think we can use some restraint to build it up to the launch. i want it to be like tiktok car edits. many angles", and earlier "even more fast paced and more hype". The production recorded that as overriding the linger rule for that film. Its board's director agents were asked for 0.23–0.9 s shots in the fast sections and 2–7 s in the restraint; the film has 183 shots in 189.6 s, a mean of 1.04 s.

DON'T LET ME SCROLL lingers: 35 scenes in 160.8 s, a mean of about 4.6 s, each carrying a whole lyric phrase. The accents go inside the shot: the camera locked to the kicks, the stabs, the vocal chops and the risers, the feed paging on the kicks, word pills slamming in on the beats.

WHITEPILL lingers longest: 27 shots in 234.8 s, a mean of about 8.7 s, every one ending on a bar line (The bar map). The verses change place with their lines, every two to six bars; each chorus holds its first four lines for eight bars with one big move or none, then cuts for the pill lines; in the break the paper refolds on every line's downbeat inside one shot, then gives way to the clouds; and the outro backs out of the nested pills, one glass wall a downbeat. The camera is calm and classical: "its kinda dizzying now" ended a first version whose previz orbited her in every shot.

THE CAKE IS NOT A LIE cuts faster and in gears: 98 shots in 208.8 s, a mean of 2.13 s and a median of 1.85 s, every cut on a bar, a half bar or a beat of a grid that drifts with the take ("make sure youre landing on bars or half or quarter bars with cuts"). Its draft 8 ran on one clock, half a bar a shot through verses, inserts and even the bridge, and the director heard it: "every time there's a shot that's literally a quarter of a second, we need to get rid of that." The re-cut measured what the viewer sees and set each shot's length by what it holds (Pacing by what a shot holds).

AERO is a screen recording that dances. The director's production ask: "we can have very long scenes (those look great) with no cuts for multiple bars, but you can treat it like dancing : you have some long scenes for many bars, but then you can choose a different sound you pick out and have many actions v fast to hit the sound after a bar wraps up and feels like we should change the pace, or many cuts. but dont overwhelm people - slow is better than fast, unless it feels intentional with the song." So the shots hold for bars while the cursor, the windows and her performance carry the time, then a burst on a chosen sound: three permission prompts on sixteenths, twelve photos raced one per sixteenth on "I was a lot" (thirty-seconds would have flashed single frames), every one of the drop's 27 chopped vocal hits answered on the surface; then calm again. A click's press lands on its beat, the pointer arriving a few frames early, like a hand. Its 34 scenes average about 5.9 s.

DOWNFORCE's pace follows the song's energy map. The countdown before the launch holds seven shots of 0.46–3.66 s while only the type moves fast; the launch lands on the song's first full-strength hit; the voice-spam stretches cut on every repeated word (each sung "one", each "done", each vocal chop); each drop is heavier than the last; and the dips between the drops slow down for a push into the smoke or a held walk-out. Single long takes still carry moments that need them: the second climb under "The last car can't be beat.", her walk out of the real kickflip smoke under "real!".

The bar map

WHITEPILL's director, resetting the film after its first cut: "there is this temporal signature that screams claude now that a ton of people are making the videos. people say pacing or prosody. … maybe we need the beat structure and only have cuts at ends of bars or sections. like, the audio structure and video structure need to be consonant." So the film was written again from the song's bar map before any shot:

1. The song's map first: the sections in bars, read off the stems' energy per bar and where the bass drops in and out (intro A, bars 1–8, no bass; the bass in on 9; a breakdown on 15; verse 1 from 17; and so on to the end, on the downbeat of bar 123).
2. Shots in bars: each shot is [bar a, bar b), one place per shot, every camera note written in bars.
3. Cuts only on bar lines, at a section's start, a phrase line (2, 4 or 8 bars into the section) or the downbeat where a sung phrase begins, so the image arrives with its line, never mid-sentence. A cut anywhere else is a choice, written down.
4. Moves in bars: each starts on a downbeat and comes to rest on one, a bar before the cut where it can.
5. Length from the song: a shot longer than the model's limit goes in squeezed and is stretched back; a failed take is made again, never cut around.
6. Measured after every assembly: the cuts against the bars and the sung lines, the picture's motion against the arrangement bar by bar, a frame per bar on a sheet, both sides of every cut.

The previz went through fifteen versions on that map, with a critic agent reading it as the director would, round after round, before the director saw it. In the final all 29 picture changes sit on bar lines; four fall inside a sung line, three of them on a section line, and the fourth, at bar 27, is the cut onto the paradise line's last syllable. The spec: What to build.

Pacing by what a shot holds

THE CAKE IS NOT A LIE's director on draft 8: "Like the only time that we should do these fast cuts is if it's a very simple scene that you can understand immediately and it's being used as percussion basically, or maybe there's four fast hits, then you can do four quick scenes, but you never do it just to add a scene in the middle." … "Maybe you can even do some research about how to make the pacing feel good." The analysis counted pieces (what the viewer sees between two visible cuts, by scene detection on the cut and on every take) and found the cut running on one clock: a median piece of 1.24 s, 48 of 108 pieces a half bar, and the bridge, the song's quietest section, cut fastest of all. The rules that re-cut it:

1. No piece under 1 s outside a run. A run is 3–4 simple, centred images on the beat for a musical reason, held before and after: the four lessons on the intro's sliced hold, the four escapes on "Four of us got out of the test", three tests on the beats of one bar.
2. Length by content. Her face and simple images from 2 beats; a story scene with one idea 3 beats; a new place, a new character, text, or action with several subjects a bar or more; the payoffs longer. Chell's first appearance and the capture in France got a full bar each; the payoff, Chell eating cake with her, 3.1 s.
3. The cut rate by section. A fast passage opens on its musical event and stays fast for its phrase, then releases. The verses tell the story at 2–4 beats a scene; the bridge breathes (from seven half-bar shots to a hold of 2.5 s on her); the climax holds its payoff.
4. A story image arrives with its line, on the line's pickup, a quarter bar before the downbeat, where the footage allows. Before, the capture, Cave Johnson behind his glass and the ^NOT each arrived a beat into their lines, whose first words played over the picture before.
5. Never a scene "in the middle" of her performance for its own sake. The medal memory in the middle of her stutter went, as the director asked of the moment: "We could just stay on her face."

Eight shots came out and 21 were re-timed or re-trimmed from the takes already made: the median piece went from 1.24 to 1.84 s, half-bar pieces from 48 to 34, isolated pieces under 1 s from 2 to 0. The measures and the research: What to build.

Compose like a photograph

The director on DON'T LET ME SCROLL's first cut: "the elements you chose are usually GREAT, what is nto great is where she is placed in the screen. it should be like photography, i feel weird looking at a clipped off the edge ost and a claudia in the middle bottom of the screen." And on the shots that followed: "its good assets but not a nice rule of thirds or photography like feel." Most of the film was recomposed. The rules every shot of the second version followed:

• Thirds: she stands on the right third beside the giant X screen; lying on the glass, her face is on the right third and the clock skyline on the left.
• Her big: a figure small at the bottom centre reads as a placeholder. Frame her as the subject.
• Nothing clipped: every card and post fully inside the frame, with margins.
• She touches the world: "she shouldnt really be looking down on her phone, she should be immersed in a world and the screen of her phone should be large on the screen and she interacts with it, rather than a literal phone." She swipes a giant feed with her palm, double-taps a post in the air, pushes the Ignore Limit pill, works a giant Liquid Glass screen from behind. No phone in her hand.
• Apple-precise interfaces: real margins and continuous corners, text that fits its platter (Motion).

Board it that way from the start: each shot's card says where she stands in the frame and what she touches.

WHITEPILL composed by symmetry instead. Its look was the director's "very wes anderson", and every prompt of its masters asks for "perfectly symmetrical, centred compositions, the camera square-on to the scene with a level horizon, everything arranged in flat, orderly planes like a stage set or a dollhouse". The opening adds where she stands: "Claudia stays in the exact centre of the frame, halfway between the blue capsule on the left and the red capsule on the right".

Her share of the screen

• She is on screen at least 70% of the runtime. ESCAPE VELOCITY reached 83%. Above 85%, leave room for inserts. A second main character can lower it; CLODYSSEY planned 60%.
• Count honestly: she counts only when recognisable (face, figure or back view). Hands, boots, tags and props are inserts.
• No stretch without her longer than two bars.
• To raise the share, convert prop inserts, not her shots: put the prop in her hand, or her reflection in it.
• She sings on camera for most sung words, in chains of lip-sync windows. In ESCAPE VELOCITY that was 62% of sung words, plus 17% of spoken words said straight into the lens.
• A film whose star is real footage sets its own target. DOWNFORCE's plan put her on screen 25–40% of the runtime, counting the PILOT ✶ CLAUDIA callout riding the real car: the final board has her image 24% of the time and the filled callout another 9%. She never sings on camera there; cuts to her cockpit show what each real reading does to her (pressed into the seat, lying back at ninety degrees, hanging upside down, weightless).

Showing the story's levels

AIRPLANE MODE's story has layers. In the real world Claudia sits cuffed on a plane with a VR headset on. Inside the headset is a first simulation, and she drops through deeper ones until a counter passes a million, then climbs back out to a "real world" that is still a simulation. The director's note on the first cut: "there should clearly be some effects or roto or whatever that makes it feel like we're in cyberspace/vr space, and this is virtual claudia". And on her putting goggles on inside the simulation: "its like spawning a subagent. these things can be text on the screen."

One look per level, and only one:

1. A small tag names the level in a corner of the frame: SIM LEVEL 1. It types in on the beat grid and rolls its digits when the level changes. During the recursion it races from 2 to 1,048,576 in steps on the sixteenths. The deeper levels draw it in the game's pixel font.
2. A level change is an event, in words. Entering the simulation, the headset's light carries the camera in while SANDBOX v1 · EVAL ENV · SIM LEVEL 1 types one row per beat and the cyberspace builds out of the real frame. "Put me in airplane mode", sung inside the simulation, types SPAWNING SUBAGENT… and fills a bar on the sixteenths to the drop, where the tag rolls to SIM LEVEL 2.
3. The real world has no tag. A cut to it removes the tag; a cut back types it in again.
4. One table drives every chapter. The levels against song time live in one file (Data formats). Chapters read it and never re-type a level.
5. The tag can carry the twist. After her breakout the tag reads SIM LEVEL 0 · REAL WORLD and stays on screen: the quiet tell. It tears apart only when guards lift the headset off her in the real cabin.
6. A break in the story hides it. A full-frame card that interrupts the simulation covers the tag, like a commercial break.
7. No flashes at a level change. The tag ramps, types, rolls or cuts with the shot.

How the two treatments are made: Motion, and the specs in What to build.

In and out of the screen

AERO's director on its second draft, whose first 1:20 ran flat on the desktop: "1:20 on is perfect but its very boring up to 1:20 - so i dont think that people will watch til then. thats the main problem ... whats something at the level of the 3d curved monitor we can do from 0-1:20 that feels as strong visually as the full beautiful scenes and curved 3d area ... a LOT more playful, higher energy, visually compelling ... think about the story - what is the hook and what is the visual hook that matches the energy of the initial hook that keeps you watching?" Three concepts went back, and the director chose a mix: the first 1:20 inside the dream of the future, in a place of its own (a sea with glass walkways, floating islands and fish, the desktop on a huge curved screen), with a little of her at full size playing with the interface as glass. Then, before any final render:

1. A previs of the whole 1:20 at 960 × 540, 1,949 frames, the camera planned beat by beat. It was all 3D (a pane shattering on the bell, a fall into the world, her tile as a glass monolith rising from the sea, Flip 3D as a carousel the camera rides, the world stopping and dimming with every prompt, a giant prompt, the chorus's nouns as panes the camera punches through). The director: "i think a lighter touch here is btter, rght direction - like good 3d scene, good cursor, but way too disorienting overal."
2. A second previs: one continuous camera with the curved screen the hero, about 95 % of the frame for the screen's beats, nothing in the world reacting to the screen, nothing full-frame for a frame.
3. Two films of the finals. The lighter finals had lost the 3D ("Why'd you remove a lot of the 3d? ... bring back a lot of the 3d camera movements"), so two went back over the same bars: A with 3D push-ins, arcs and pull-outs, and B with the same moves but the zooms made by the screen's own picture. The director, on both: "i hate the random camera movements - lik ethe big zoom out at 0:41 for no reason. were not showing anything there. overall, te transition at 1:21ish is good that goes into the actual desktop environment. i think the 0-1:20 scenes should use this -say, at 15 seconds, actually enter the screen and then its fullscreen flat."

The structure that came out of it is three spans in 3D, each for a moment that needs the world, and the rest flat with the earlier draft's own 2D zooms:

• 0:03–0:15: from the restart's black into the world, a slow glide up the walkway, her apparition on "Did you miss me?", the screen about 95 % of the frame by the desktop's arrival, and in to the flat screen.
• 0:27–0:31: "Most of it is on the outside": five of her thought windows lift off the screen as glass panes into a slow ring in front of it, and fold home.
• 0:38–0:55: a slow pull-out as she dances on the walkway beside the screen, out through the held breath while she aims a game remote at Allow, and back in after the click.

Every camera move has a reason: a move that shows nothing new reads as random. And every hand-off between 3D and flat goes through a rest pose where the two are the same picture (What to build).

What moves, and what it costs

• Sung windows run 4–8 s, start in a word gap, and list their exact words. Never more than 8 s of singing in one clip. Chain windows with alternating framings, so that a cover cut looks designed.
• Motion clips run 4–12 s.
• One image per shot. Two clips never start from the same frame: use a sibling candidate, or the previous clip's last frame.
• A 2.5D treatment never repeats on two shots in a row. It is never a still with a slow zoom. The director: "that's where we'll have to shine and be creative. depth to separate layers ofc, motion graphics galore, diversity so its not repetitive".
• The budget: ESCAPE VELOCITY planned 47 clips (224 s) and generated 421 s. CLODYSSEY planned 101 clips (about 116 s sung and 282 s motion). Allow about 60% more sung seconds for divergence covers.

How the films boarded

ESCAPE VELOCITY's board came from a multi-agent workflow:

• Three director agents boarded the song independently: a fashion film, meme density, and narrative.
• Three judges scored the boards, which came in between 70 and 81; the narrative board won.
• A head director merged the best of the three and checked the merge itself.
• It took about 1.5 hours.

The checks were:

• the shots tile the song;
• the cuts land on beats;
• every line is typed;
• she is on screen enough;
• the clips fit the budget and their windows;
• no image repeats.

DOWNFORCE's board came from the same shape, built for real footage (What to build):

• Three director agents each cut the whole 3:09.6 in the director's direction: a TikTok car-edit editor, a film director (the launch as a story) and a motion-design lead (the data drives the edit).
• Three judges scored them as the audience, as the director's taste, and as a producer checking that every named source time exists and every generated shot fits the budget. The TikTok board won (83, 80, 83), the film-director agent's scored 79, 79, 85 and the motion board 75, 77, 81.
• The head director agent merged onto the TikTok base: from the film-director agent's board the 0–60 dial that fills in exactly 0.81 s, the empty callout that fills on the reveal and the grid of 1s; from the motion board the one hairline, the world turned by the real pitch, and the smoke in reverse.
• It wrote a checker and ran it until every gate passed: 182 shots, 59% real footage, 37% generated, 4% pure code. It took about two hours.

A single writer working from the director's walkthrough, with a critic agent behind it, works too. DON'T LET ME SCROLL's board was one writer's, the production lead's, and went to the director about an hour and a quarter after the first message: 35 shots on the bar grid, all 31 lines on a surface, and 37 takes in three kinds (R the real bedroom at 16:9; P her alone on grey, to be cut out; G her three other selves for the final drop). The looks followed the story: one in the bedroom, one for chorus 1, one for verse 2 and chorus 2, one with a blazer for verse 3. The director's notes came on the first cut instead of the board; the second version kept the 35 scenes and recomposed most of them.

WHITEPILL boarded twice. Its first board, one day inside the good ending from dawn to 2:14 a.m., had 29 shots on phrase starts, and it grew into a previz whose camera orbited her in every shot; the director dropped it after the first cut ("i totally overindexed on the orbit thing lol"). The second was one writer's shot list on the bar map (The bar map): 26 shots, 20 of her in the colony's places and 6 shader worlds (27 in the final, with the break in two), each with its bars, its place, its action and its camera in bars. Its reviews were the previz itself, watched by a critic agent as the director would, then by the director: "ok i like it … the pacing is great", and on the next version, "this is great, lets shoot the whole thing."

THE CAKE IS NOT A LIE boarded three times. The first film's board was written as a document until the director asked for pictures ("not a markdown the storyboard should be pics"): 50 shots, each a frame of Portal 2 edited by an image model with her look and the props, on a PDF of cards. The director: "Lol I love it go ahead and make the whole thing." The restart, on the new song, was the lead's shot list of 114 shots on the drum-tracked grid, every shot starting on a bar, a half bar or a beat, each with its story event, what we see, its 3D camera move, its generation unit and the song glitches it hits; every agent worked from it with the brief and the story. Then every unit's first frame was made again in Midjourney twice over, from words (X) and from the earlier frame reimagined (Y), each put back on the character sheets by an image-model edit, on one board per section of the song with the earlier frame beside them; the director picked unit by unit (Midjourney).

AERO boarded in pictures, then in bars. Storyboard v1 was 36 frames, one per lyric beat of the second draft, before the song was picked: Midjourney's worlds in the look of the reference videos, with her put in from her design sheet by twenty image-model edits. Once the take was locked, storyboard v2 was written in bars from the song map, every time derived from a bar, a beat or a word, with the machine's continuity (the one PC every chapter starts from) and each shot's lyric surface, the action on each beat and its assets; its rules for every shot were the director's, the earlier film's notes ("the bible") and the reference videos ("the new testament"). Its first 1:20 was boarded again twice, through the previs and the two films (In and out of the screen).

Whichever way you board, the audit below decides when the board is ready to show.

The audit

The audit runs after every edit to the board. The board is not sent to the director until every gate passes. (In code: What to build.)

An edit of real footage adds gates for its source windows (inside the clip, above the broadcast's readout, never across a cut in the source), its flashes (only on cuts) and its generated shots (each one used, inside its budget, every plate with the canon text verbatim). They are listed in What to build.

A film written on the bar map checks its cuts against the bars as well: every cut on a bar line, each one off a section or phrase line or a sung phrase's downbeat written down as a choice, and every cut inside a sung line listed with its line (What to build).

A film whose pace is measured adds the pacing flags: an isolated piece under 1 s, anything under 0.5 s, four or more pieces in a row of the same length, and a story image that arrives a beat into its line (What to build).

It also warns, without failing:

• a sung shot whose prompt puts a microphone, a hand or hair in front of her mouth;
• her share above 85%;
• the same transition twice in a row;
• a plate no shot uses;
• a clip that no shot plays.

The board review

The sheet. One card per shot, in order:

• the picked frame, or the first words of the plate prompt if there is no image yet;
• the id, the time and the lyric;
• the framing, the action in one line and what moves;
• the explaining graphic in one line;
• a FACE? badge on any plate whose face may be off-model.

ESCAPE VELOCITY's sheet ran 13 pages of 12 cards, with a cover page showing the chapter map. If the film has a grade, show graded frames: the director judges what the film will look like.

The message, sent once:

The storyboard for <TITLE> is ready: <N> shots, Claudia on screen <X>%, <M> clips (<S> s, about $<E>).
[the board sheet]
Please flag anything by shot id: faces, repeats, boring moments, story logic, colour.
<only if the director set a window:> I'll go ahead in <W> minutes unless you say stop.
Open questions: <…>

The rules:

1. Silence counts as approval only if the director set the window, and silence never approves spending.
2. While you wait, do only work that costs nothing, such as the plate prompt book and contact sheets.
3. Log every note verbatim against its shot id. Apply every note; when two notes conflict, the later one wins.
4. Re-run the audit. Send the board again only if the director asked to see it. "make all those changes and we're good to go" means go ahead.
5. A change after approval makes the approval stale. Say in one line what changed, and ask again.

What the director's notes looked like, and what each one changed: