Week 10 Set: Build a story bible

Writing down the visual-language rules your capstone has to obey across every clip, then proving two clips actually obey them

26 April 2027

Before the session#

Have a rough idea, even a bad one, of what your Direct a Slop Feature piece is about. You don’t need a script; you need a genre and a look.

In the session#

One clip is easy. Five linked clips that read as one piece is the actual difficulty of the capstone, and it’s a coherence problem, not a generation problem — the models can make any single frame; keeping the same frame’s rules true forty shots later is what breaks. Write a story bible: one to two pages, plain prose or a table, stating a fixed colour or lighting rule (a LUT description, a time-of-day constraint), a method for keeping a character or setting consistent (a locked seed, a reference-image conditioning set, a described costume and prop list if your tool doesn’t support seed-locking), and one recurring motif that has to appear in every piece (an object, a camera move, a sound cue).

Then prove it: produce two test frames or clips from the bible, made minutes apart or days apart, and check whether a stranger could tell they’re from the same piece without being told. If they can’t, the bible is underspecified — usually because “consistent lighting” was never turned into a rule concrete enough to check, the same gap that lets a batch of b-roll drift from golden hour to overcast within one reflection without anyone flagging it.

Afterwards#

The bible is a working document, not a deliverable — expect to revise it once the capstone script exists. Bring it to week 11, where the director’s statement has to account for what the bible commits you to.