About 25 minutes of my time if I only make decisions; 1½–2 hours if I also paint over the references and touch the Blender file. Those two optional steps are where a film gets most of its quality. Everything else, including waiting for the GPU, runs without me: Claude queues the renders and wakes itself when they finish.
One message: who's in it, the idea, the length, and "local" or "cloud". Add a reference video if I want to copy a technique.
Loads the character pages and my render notes. If I gave a video, it transcribes it and turns it into a step table.
Look at the storyboard. Orange panels get a Blender previs; the rest go straight to video. Swap any I disagree with.
Timed beats per shot, a rough board, and the Blender / straight-to-video split already marked.
Four candidates per new character, monster, prop or place. Say what I like: "hair from 2, coat from 4". Confirm any new character fact.
New designs: 4 candidates each. Existing characters: sheets built from the canon image, never reinvented.
Lift brightness and saturation, add loose strokes around each silhouette, fix any wrong detail. Every reference ends up in one look, and the video copies the look of its references.
Say what breaks: a prop drifting, the style going 3D, someone appearing who shouldn't. Each problem becomes a rule for this film.
One or two short clips with every asset thrown in, before any real shot.
Press 0 for the camera view, then play. Drag a camera path point, retime a key, or pull the camera back where the grey shapes are hard to read. The model follows these timings.
Built in Blender from code: true proportions, squash and stretch, the camera move, handheld noise, an animated lens. Cut into one 6-second chunk per clip, with cuts on chunk boundaries.
Check them against canon: the right mask, the right weapon, who's in the shot.
Scene and style, labelled references, timed beats, locks, animation principles. Name only who is in the shot. Two reference images max on 8 GB (merge sheets side by side), previs strength 0.55.
One GPU lease per clip, waiting its turn behind other sessions; cached models unloaded first; a live watchdog cancels any clip past 15 minutes.
The film with the Blender previs drawn in red over the generation. Name any shot that's off and what's wrong.
A 3×3 sheet per take. Side-by-side, crossfade and red-overlay videos for every previs shot.
The cut arrives with sound effects only. Add music or change trims if I want.
Hard cuts at 1080p, SFX only, levelled to −16 LUFS, a speech-to-text pass for stray voices, plus the red-outline version.
Is the new sheet the "best" asset? Is the new monster canon? One word each.
The picture library with captions, a report with every take, character facts to their canon pages, render facts to the notes.