01
The page is the result
A screenplay shows you the choice. It cannot show you what it was chosen over, who argued for it, or what the film is trying to be.
The Film Graph · Product 01
Development & pre-production
The layer where a project stops being a pile of documents and becomes a structure the rest of the company can read.
Live with first pilot · The company
The thesis
The script is lossy compression
01 / 03
02
The reasoning is the material
The book, the interviews, the notes from six people, the buyer's constraints, the alternatives that were rejected. That is what a film is made of, and it is discarded in the rendering.
03
Why the tools disappoint
A model reading a screenplay alone gives generic notes, because a screenplay alone is all it has. Grounding lives upstream of the page.
Finished screenplays are everywhere. The path that produced them exists nowhere.
The foundation
One structure, whatever it starts as
- Story Definition
- Characters
- World
- Story Engine
- One Page
- Story Bible
- Beat Sheet
- Outline
- Final Script
You bring
A finished screenplay
Read scene by scene, mapped onto all nine surfaces
Live
You bring
A book or source prose
Compressed, then mapped onto the same nine
Live
You bring
A pitch and nothing else
The nine are built up with you, field by field
Live
You bring
A drive folder
Sorted, deduplicated, and read into the project it belongs to
Live
Context carried forward
The fields become the film
The nine surfaces are not a filing system. They produce the documents a company works in, and those documents resolve — unit by unit — into the visual decisions of the film.
01 · Fields
The foundation
Characters · World · Story Engine · Beat Sheet
02 · Produce
Documents
Outline · Final script · Story bible · One page
03 · Break into
Units of analysis
Scene · Outline beat · Character profile · Location
04 · Resolve to
Visual decisions
Reference frames · Character & costume · World plates
Example 01
Outline scene → reference frames
- Story Definition
- Characters
- World
- Story Engine
- One Page
- Story Bible
- Beat Sheet
- Outline
- Final Script
Outline › Act II › Scene 14
INT. HARBOUR WAREHOUSE — NIGHT
- Function
- The turn. She learns the shipment was always hers.
- Beat
- Midpoint · false victory
- Carries
- Story Engine → the debt she inherited
nightinterior low keyominous widecool grade
Pulled from the index — 993 frames, tagged on the same vocabulary
Lighting plot
generated from tags
generated from tags
Shot list
stub
stub
Example 02
Character profile → design & costume
- Story Definition
- Characters
- World
- Story Engine
- One Page
- Story Bible
- Beat Sheet
- Outline
- Final Script
Characters › Protagonist
MAREN OKSA · 34
- Want
- To clear the debt and leave the island.
- Wound
- Was the one who signed. Has never said so.
- Wardrobe note
- Inherited oilskin, two sizes too big. Never replaced.
close uptense weatheredcool gradenatural light
Reference pulled · design surfaces generated
Character design plate
Costume board
oilskin · palette
oilskin · palette
Casting comparables
Ageing / continuity
across acts
across acts
Example 03
World entry → environment plates
- Story Definition
- Characters
- World
- Story Engine
- One Page
- Story Bible
- Beat Sheet
- Outline
- Final Script
World › Locations › 03
THE OUTER BANKS
- Period
- Late 70s, off-season. Nothing new built since.
- Rule
- The sea is never shown calm before Act III.
- Appears in
- Scenes 2, 9, 14, 31 — carried from Story Engine
extreme wideoutdoor nature isolatingovercastdesaturated
Reference pulled · plates and continuity generated
Concept plate
Location scout brief
Palette strip
pulled from references
pulled from references
01 · Where we are
Development
The nine surfaces. Every document produced from one source of truth.
02 · Building now
Pre-production
Scene, character and world resolve into references, plates and boards.
03 · Inherits
Production
A schedule that knows why a scene matters, not only how long it takes.
04 · Inherits
Post & delivery
The cut measured against the film it set out to be.
The refusal
It hands you the marble block
Around seventy-five per cent of it, so that a person carves the last twenty-five. It does not replace authorship, and it is not built to.
The work stays the author's
AI is used where judgment is genuinely required and nowhere else. Everything that can be deterministic is deterministic.
Your material is yours
It is not trained on and it does not leave your tenant. Isolation is architectural rather than a promise in a contract.
One of five
This is one function of a production company
Development and pre-production is where we started, because it is where the context is born. It is not the whole of what a production company runs on.