Working in the studio

This is the conceptual pass — what it is like to work here — not the command manual. Every mechanic named here is documented in Reference; you will want it open beside you the first week and almost never after that.

What stays constant when everything else changes

Everybody works on something different. One person is cutting a reaction series for a brand program; another is developing a personal film nobody has asked for; a third is running prompt benches to find out what a model refuses to do. The studio does not care which — it holds the same rails under all of it:

• A production is a folder of durable files. Brief, prompts, takes, verdicts, decisions: all written down, in the open, in your workspace. Not in a chat transcript, not in anyone's memory. Any session, on any machine, can pick up exactly where the last one stopped.
• Ideas are free; epochs of work are gated. Think out loud as long as you like — planning, riffing, arguing with the brief. Nothing is spent and nothing renders until you name an intended result and scope, and the studio runs its cost, identity, prompt and phase checks. A local GPU job clears the same way; zero credits does not make it automatic.
• Approval is a series of deliberate acts. An approved take, a selected take, an encoded cut and a published file are four different states, and no one of them collapses into the next. "Interesting" is not a verdict; silence is not an approval; a teammate's comment on the review board is a note back to you, not a ruling.
• The studio rules the how. You own the what and the look. Doctrine, spend laws and gates exist so the work can be reproduced and so the licence commitments hold. Whether a shot is good is not a question the system answers — that judgment is yours, made take by take, and the record of it is yours too.

Everything else — the medium, the genre, the register, how weird it gets — is per production and mostly per person. That is the point.

The shape of a piece

Whatever you are making, it moves through the same stations:

Intent. You say what it is for, what it should communicate, where it will live, and what you want to explore. The assistant captures the brief, separates decisions from open questions, and reads it back before any of it becomes assumption. This is the conversation half of the studio, and it is where most of the thinking happens. Directing from the chair is the honest guide to this part.

Structure. A brief becomes scenes and shots. Each shot carries its immutable prompt versions — you never overwrite a prompt, you version it, so "why did take 3 look like that" always has an answer.

Evidence. Generation produces takes. You judge exact takes with named verdicts and time-stamped notes; approved takes collect into selects. Change your mind and the record changes with you — verdicts are re-openable, but they are never quietly rewritten.

Assembly. A cut is edited and exported explicitly; an export is a file, not a finishing verdict. The finishing gate checks edit, sound and grade against shared requirements and records SHIP or HOLD.

Delivery. Publishing is its own, separate cue — named piece, named destination. The machine-image: four separate keys, and someone must turn each one on purpose.

A session, honestly

Most sessions are conversation. You sit down with an idea, or with yesterday's handoff, and you talk — pull on a thread, challenge an assumption, park a thought for later. When the work reaches a boundary the studio names it in plain language: what is missing, what is blocked, what is yours to decide.

It respects your attention. A handoff at the end of a session lists the exact artifact paths and the next authorized step, and the next session reads it — which is why riffs are saved as threads and verdicts are saved as decisions, not left in scrollback.

Failures are loud. If a check blocks a shot you hear why, not a silent substitute lane. If a file the workflow expects is missing, that is reported as a missing dependency, not worked around.

Where people diverge

This is the subjective part, and no doc should pretend otherwise:

• Whose work is this? Team work runs on the team's pack — canon, lexicon, doctrine overlay, review surfaces. Personal work runs in its own workspace under the default doctrine, and the wall between them is real: personal projects never appear on team surfaces. If you are here for the team, install the pack and use its register; if you are here for your own film, stay unattached.
• How weird do you want it? The doctrine's defaults are conservative about process — prompts versioned, spends receipted, approvals deliberate — and deliberately open about aesthetic. Briefs should be written in the affirmative: say what you want, not what you don't, because a list of negations reads to a generator as its nouns.
• How much do you drive? You can run through the assistant entirely, or open the tools yourself — set up the lanes, fire the benches, cut in your editor. The studio is files and contracts; nothing needs the chat to be present.

First session, in practice

1. Set up — a working checkout and a workspace; no provider account needed to begin.
2. Run the no-provider rehearsal: the whole workflow with practice media, zero spend. It leaves example decisions and a handoff behind, which is the fastest way to see what "the record" means.
3. Pick the real thing you want to make — something you would make anyway — and start at Intent above. Bring references. Do not pick a model; that is a gate-time decision, and the studio will tell you when.

When you want the mechanics — every session command, gate and receipt, all of it — it is in the Reference section, and it is there for the moment something concrete needs checking, not before.