The Director Review

The Director Review is where the engine shows you what it made of your story — the cast it found, the places it identified, the beats it broke the story into — and asks you to correct it before anything gets compiled.

It is the last cheap place to fix things. Everything downstream of this screen costs either credits or re-work.

What is on the page

• Your three creative choices, shown as read-only chips.
• Cast cards — one per character the engine found, with identity images.
• Set cards — one per scene, with the image every shot in that scene is built on.
• Beats — the story broken into the units that become shots.

The creative chips are a report, not a control

Your format, style and tone appear here so you can see what produced the sets and cast in front of you. They are not editable — they locked when the story was created, and the images on this page were generated from them.

A story created before creative intent existed shows no chips at all. That is deliberate: those stories were never given a stated intent, and showing an invented default would misreport what actually produced what you are looking at.

Cast

Each character card carries an identity image and the appearance text it was generated from. Everything about how those work — the one free generation, editing the description, Start over, groups, non-human characters, reusing a saved character — is in Character Generation & Identity.

The one thing to carry into this screen: generate and approve your cast before you approve the review. Identity is what keeps a face consistent across every shot, and adding it later does not repair shots already rendered.

Sets

Each scene gets one image and every shot in that scene is built on it. Generating, describing, uploading your own and approving are all covered in Set Generation.

Same rule as the cast: approve your sets here, at full size, before approving the review.

Beats

Beats are the units the engine broke your story into, and they are what become shots. On this screen you can:

• Refine a beat — adjust what it says.
• Split a beat — when one beat is carrying two moments that want separate shots.
• Mark a beat minimal — when it should stay simple rather than being enriched.
• Remove an enrichment — when the engine added something you do not want.
• Undo the last edit — on a per-beat basis.

If the beat breakdown is badly wrong, that is usually a signal about the story text rather than about the beats — see Writing a Story the Engine Can Direct, particularly the part about blank lines. Fixing the prose and re-analysing is often faster than editing ten beats.

What approving actually does

Approving is not just navigation. When you approve:

1. 1 Compilation starts StoryDirector begins compiling your beats, cast and sets into the actual prompts each shot will be rendered from. This runs in the background.
2. 2 Your story is marked ready The draft moves out of review and into production, and your approval is recorded with it.
3. 3 You are moved to the output page Immediately — you do not wait on the compile. The Director Output shows its progress and updates as it finishes.

You can still edit afterwards

Approving is not a sealed door — individual shots can be edited on the Director Output, including their prompts and durations. But the cheap, broad fixes live here, and the expensive, narrow ones live there. Use the cheap ones first.

Next

The Director Output — rendering your shots, what a chain costs, and the re-rendering rule.