# How a film is made

> A song, a face that holds, a board of shots, and an edit made in code — each step checked before the next one costs anything.

Every film on the label is made by the same pipeline, the Castpad renderer. It is open: it lives in the repository under `renderer/`. A person makes four choices; everything else is done and checked by the pipeline.

## The four choices

| | What you see | What you decide |
|---|---|---|
| Concept | three one-line ideas for the film | which story this is |
| Face | four faces drawn from the same words | which one is the artist, from now on |
| Song | two takes, or your own recording | what the film is cut to |
| First cut | the whole film | accept, or say what to change |

Nothing that costs money starts before the face is chosen.

## The steps

1. **The artist in words.** The brief becomes identity text, a wardrobe, a world of sets and a never-list. The identity text is pasted word for word into every prompt that follows.
2. **The song.** Analysed into a beat grid, bars, sections and the time of every sung line.
3. **The treatment.** Three acts, the motifs that carry through them, the hero shots, how it opens and how it closes.
4. **The board.** One shot per line or bar: a framing, a lens, a set, an action, and whether the shot sings. An audit refuses a board with repeated shots or a chorus without a hero image.
5. **The plates.** A first frame for every shot, made from the chosen face. Where there are candidates, a vision model picks one and rejects any face that drifts.
6. **Motion.** Each plate becomes a moving shot. Singing shots get the vocal for exactly their window and are kept only if the mouth measurably follows it.
7. **The edit.** Cut in code on the beat grid: lyrics on screen inside their sung window, the template's grade, type and device, a master and a vertical cut from the same frames.
8. **The checks.** Length, every cut on a beat, every sung line on screen (`N/N`), no unsafe flashing, no dead black. A film that fails a hard check is not delivered.

## What a film page shows

Everything above, as it happened: the numbers (shots, prompts, images, clips, takes, cost, time), frames from the cut, every image the film was made from with its prompt — including the ones that were not picked — and the record: the story, every still prompt, every motion prompt, the song as timed. See [The film package](/wiki/package).

## Templates

A template is a feel, not a filter: cut rhythm, transitions, camera moves, grade, grain, type, the device that runs through the film, framing and voice. Two families: **film** (photographic, the camera as a witness) and **anime** (cel-shaded, held frames, speed lines, kinetic type). Each artist gets the one that fits, so no two artists look alike.

## A director's cut

The pipeline can stop before the plates and hand a director a prompt book for an image tool used by hand. The images come back in, are matched to their shots, and the rest of the pipeline continues. The film's record says which way it was made.