Storycraft

Write the planning documents a short film is built from, with narrative intelligence: a treatment, style bible, beat sheet, screenplay, and shot list under films/<slug>/. The craft here decides whether the film moves anyone; seedance then turns these documents into generation input.

• IS: story structure, character, theme, stakes, tone, and the conventions of each planning document. The WHAT and the WHY.
• IS NOT: the shots.json / stills.json schema, the verbatim-paste continuity mechanism, prompt assembly (all in seedance), the CLI (vs), or image prompts (nano-banana-2).

Read references/story-principles.md first for any story question. Then write the documents in order, each one feeding the next. Each reference below covers one document's craft.

The pipeline

These films are short (about 30 seconds to a few minutes). Generation count and
per-clip duration follow the story and the model envelope: Seedance 2.5
renders up to 30s in a single pass, Seedance 2.0 up to 15s. That changes what
a generation is. At 8s a generation is a BEAT. At 30s it is an ACT holding
five to seven internal beats that the model cuts between, so a two-minute film
is four generations rather than fifteen. Do not force a fixed shot length.
Every generation costs money, so the story must be proven on paper before any
spend. The documents are a cost ladder of their own: cheap decisions lock
before expensive ones. Public example: films/lighthouse/ (a 2.0 film, 12
generations at 8s).

Storycraft progress:
- [ ] Design the FINAL image first, then the throughline it proves (Pixar rule 7)
- [ ] Logline (who wants what, what is in the way) + why you must tell THIS story
- [ ] Central dramatic argument: one declarative sentence someone could disagree with
- [ ] Pick a structure (the Story Spine is usually enough for a short)
- [ ] treatment.md   (the story in present-tense prose)
- [ ] style-bible.md (look, tone, character/prop blocks, secrets)
- [ ] beat-sheet.md  (one row per generation: a beat on 2.0, an act on 2.5)
- [ ] screenplay.md  (optional: read the story whole)
- [ ] shot-list.md   (per-shot staging spec)
- [ ] Hand to seedance to assemble the JSON

Design the ending before the middle. Stack the documents so each one commits something the next depends on: theme before beats, beats before shots.

Pick a document

Gotchas

Common story failures, framed from Pixar's rules:

• Passive protagonist (rule 13). A character things happen TO is poison. Give them an opinion and let them drive the beats.
• No stakes (rule 16). If nothing is lost when they fail, the audience does not care. Name what is at risk and raise it each beat.
• Theme stated, not shown (rule 3). Do not have a character announce the point. Prove it through action and the final image. Theme emerges at the end; then rewrite to earn it.
• Coincidence solving the plot (rule 19). Coincidence to get a character INTO trouble is fine; coincidence to get them OUT is cheating.
• The first idea (rule 12). Discount the first, second, third thing that comes to mind. The obvious version is rarely the good one.
• Middle before ending (rule 7). Writing the middle before the ending is locked is how shorts wander. Endings are hard; get yours working first.
• Over-stuffed short (rule 5). Simplify, focus, combine characters, hop over detours. A 2-minute film carries one clear idea, not three.
• Unpaid setups. Every setup must pay off and every payoff must be set up. The beat-sheet audits exist to catch this while fixing is still free.

Reference files

Related skills

• seedance to turn these documents into a validated shots.json / stills.json.
• vs to run the pipeline.
• nano-banana-2 to write the reference-still image prompts.