# Directing Films This is the heart of CoreReflex. You describe a film in plain language, and an **agentic director** boards it into a continuity-linked, multi-shot plan — with lenses, lighting, color, and camera moves already decided. Then it produces each shot, chains the cuts so they flow, critiques every clip against a publishing checklist from real signals in the footage, re-shoots only the ones that miss the bar (with the correction written into the reshoot), and tiles the keepers onto your timeline in order. No crew, no storyboards, no per-clip babysitting. If you're brand new, read [Getting Started](getting-started.md) first. When your film is on the timeline, head to [Editing & Mastering](editing-and-mastering.md) to finish it. **On this page** - [Where directing happens](#where-directing-happens) - [The agentic director](#the-agentic-director) - [Easy vs. Advanced](#easy-vs-advanced) - [Producing your shots](#producing-your-shots) - [Refining what comes back](#refining-what-comes-back) - [A typical workflow](#a-typical-workflow) - [Repurpose your film](#repurpose-your-film) - [Hand the whole brief to the AI Agent](#hand-the-whole-brief-to-the-ai-agent) - [Troubleshooting](#troubleshooting) - [Related pages](#related-pages) --- ## Where directing happens There are two directing surfaces, and they share one account — signing in at [corereflex.com](https://corereflex.com) carries straight into the editor. **The editor front door** — the full experience. Open a new project in the **studio editor** at [editor.corereflex.com](https://editor.corereflex.com) (the **New project** or **Direct film** buttons on the dashboard take you straight there). When a project is empty, the editor greets you with the **Director** — a single concept box asking *"What are we making?"* — instead of a bare canvas. That's your starting point. (If you'd rather build by hand, choose **Skip — start from scratch** and the timeline opens empty.) This is where you get the whole pipeline: frame-chained continuity, per-shot QA chips, and shots landing live on your timeline. **The dashboard Director Studio** — the quick loop. On the dashboard, the **Direct a film** workflow card opens a self-contained Director Studio right in the dashboard: type a concept, pick an aspect ratio and shot count, and press **Produce film**. It plans, generates each shot with live per-shot progress, then assembles the keepers into a **saved editor project** — with each clip playable right in the panel, plus **Open assembled cut →** (jump into the editor), **Render this film** (straight to Render Studio), and **Copy assembly JSON**. The quick loop is honest about its limits: it doesn't frame-chain continuity and it doesn't score shots, so its clips are marked *unscored* rather than pretending they passed QA. For the full pipeline, use the editor front door. > **Tip:** If the director ever asks you to sign in, log in at corereflex.com first, then reopen the editor. --- ## The agentic director The director is the layer that turns intent into a plan. Describe what you want in a sentence or two, and it boards a complete shot list — not a single clip, but a coherent little film with a hook, escalation, and a payoff. For every shot it commits to the things that actually decide quality: - **Subject and action** — exactly who or what is on screen and what they do. - **Camera** — the move for the shot: static, pan, tilt, dolly, truck, pedestal, zoom, orbit, or FPV (the engine also understands richer moves like crane, handheld, push-in, pull-out, whip-pan, and aerial), each with an intensity — a climax truck is punchier than a gentle resolution orbit. - **Lens** — a real focal length or look (35mm, 85mm, anamorphic). - **Lighting** — key/fill/practical sources, the time of day, the direction, and color temperature. - **Color and texture** — palette, film grain, depth of field. - **Emotional objective** — the feeling the shot is built to land (tense, tender, triumphant), so it directs *toward* something instead of just looking nice. The director also keeps shots **visual-only by design** — every shot prompt explicitly excludes music, voiceover, dialogue, on-screen text, and logos, because audio and titles belong to the edit (where you control them), not to the generation (where the model would invent them). ### Lock sheets — continuity you can trust The reason the shots cut together — rather than looking like five unrelated clips — is **continuity**, and it's built into the plan as first-class data. Before it writes any shots, the director builds **lock sheets**: - **Character lock sheets** — a dense, reusable *reference sentence* per character (face, skin tone, age, build, hair, wardrobe) that gets pasted **verbatim** into every shot prompt, so the same person shows up from the first frame to the last. Each character also gets a **bald guard clause** — the one non-negotiable detail that ruins the identity if it drifts (say, a shaved head plus a gold signet ring) — stated early in every shot. - **Location lock sheets** — the same discipline for places: layout, furniture, lighting, atmosphere, locked and repeated. - **A palette lock** — one consistent color grade across the whole film. - **A wardrobe lock** — consistent styling in every shot. And because multi-character single generations tend to merge faces, the director keeps **one character per shot** and builds group or dialogue moments in the *edit* by intercutting single-character clips. The first shot establishes the world; every later shot is designed to flow visually out of the one before it. Your plan shows this on each shot card: the role (for example, *Establishing hook*, *Rising action*, *Climax*), the camera move, the shot length, and a **continuity** marker on every shot that's chained to the previous one. ### Checked before a single credit is spent Every plan is validated the moment it's boarded — **before** any generation runs, so a broken plan can't quietly burn credits. The check is deterministic (no AI involved) and flags: - **Missing lock sheets** — no character or location anchors means identity and setting may drift across shots. - **Empty or un-producible shots** — a shot with no prompt fails loud, not at render time. - **Dropped shots** — you asked for six shots and got four? The plan says so instead of silently changing your pacing. - **Runtime drift** — the planned total is meaningfully off the length you requested. The plan also carries structural advisories that catch **slideshow-like** plans (all static shots) and **low-variation** plans (every shot looks the same) before you produce. When the optional quality judge is enabled for your workspace, the plan additionally shows a **QUALITY** panel — an overall PASS / REVISE / FAIL verdict with a scored bar per craft dimension — so you can see how the boarded plan rates before committing to production. ### Grounded in your workspace knowledge The director doesn't plan in a vacuum. If your workspace has a **Knowledge base** (the same one that grounds your voice and support agents — see [Client Operations](client-operations.md)), the director searches it for the passages most relevant to your concept and plans against **real facts about your brand** — products, positioning, do's and don'ts — instead of plausible-sounding filler. Only genuinely relevant passages are used, so an off-topic knowledge base never pollutes a plan, and the retrieved passages are treated strictly as reference facts: your concept stays the brief. Grounding is best-effort by design — if the knowledge base is empty or unavailable, planning proceeds normally without it. ### Plans never hard-fail The director's planning runs on Google's Gemini via Vertex AI, first-party on your own cloud. If that model is briefly unavailable, CoreReflex falls back to a built-in offline director so you can still get a plan and keep producing. When that happens, the plan carries a short note explaining it was boarded by the offline director (so it may be simpler) — and the note includes the real reason — so you're never left staring at a blank error. Every plan also carries a small, portable **trace** (which prompt spec and version, which model, timing) so any output is traceable and replayable later. ### The director learns what works Each time you plan, the director quietly biases toward what your workspace's audience liked. Upvoted prior clips steer it toward styles that landed, downvoted ones steer it away, and a semantic search over past prompts surfaces the upvoted shots *closest to this concept* — from your own workspace and from anonymized, top-voted prompts across the platform — so it learns what worked for ideas like this one, not just globally. The first few plans won't show much of this; it sharpens as your team votes on generations. --- ## Easy vs. Advanced The Director front door has a toggle in the top-left: **Easy** and **Advanced**. They change how much you hand over. ### Easy mode Just describe the film. That's it. The director treats a short, vague, or casual concept as a starting point and makes it make sense — it infers the most compelling genre, era, setting, mood, and protagonist that fit, then expands it into a coherent micro-narrative and directs every shot like a pro. Easy mode targets a **4–6 shot** film by default. Use Easy when you want a great result fast and you're happy to let the director make the creative calls. > **Example brief:** *"A moody 20-second teaser for a specialty coffee brand — golden hour, slow push-ins, founder voiceover."* ### Advanced mode Advanced honors your concept and settings precisely — it adds craft, not new direction, and won't override your intent. Switching to Advanced reveals the shoot controls: | Control | What it does | |---------|--------------| | **Aspect ratio** | `16:9` (widescreen), `9:16` (vertical), or `1:1` (square). | | **Tone / style** | A short style note, e.g. *gritty neo-noir*, that the director respects exactly. | | **Length** | Total film length, from **8 to 90 seconds**. | | **Shots** | How many shots to board, from **2 to 8**. | Use Advanced when you have a fixed format, a specific running time, or a defined look you need the film to match. > **Tip:** Arriving from a workflow card on the studio hub can pre-fill your concept, mode, aspect ratio, and tone through the URL — so you land in the director already primed instead of starting cold. The **Shorts** card, for example, drops you into a vertical (9:16) project with a tighter default length. When your brief is ready, press **Direct my film**. The plan forms in front of you, shot by shot — title, logline, and every slate card with its role, camera, length, and continuity marker. --- ## Producing your shots A plan is a blueprint; producing it is where the footage gets made. Review the boarded shots, then press **Produce all shots**. CoreReflex runs an agentic **PRODUCE → CRITIQUE → ASSEMBLE** loop. Walking the plan in order, for each shot it: 1. **Generates the clip** with a state-of-the-art video model — **Veo** (or **Kling**), routed automatically. 2. **Frame-chains for seamless cuts.** On any shot the director marked for continuity, the last frame of the previous clip is extracted and handed to the next generation as a starting image — so the cut is clean and the world stays continuous. (Frame-chaining is best-effort: if a frame can't be extracted, that shot simply falls back to a fresh text-to-video generation rather than failing — and the shot is honestly marked as degraded continuity, not silently passed off as chained.) 3. **Critiques the result** against the publishing checklist (below) and, when the pipeline runs server-side, **re-shoots just the shots that miss the bar** — keeping the best attempt. Strong shots are never re-run; only the weak ones cost a retry. 4. **Tiles the clip onto the timeline**, immediately after the previous shot. Each slate card shows a live status as production moves through it — *generating…*, *placing…*, then *✓ ready* (or *✕ failed*) — and a running count (for example, *Producing… 3/5*). You can **Cancel** at any time; shots already placed stay on your timeline. When every shot lands, choose **Open in the editor** to start finishing. If production errored partway, the button becomes **Retry production** so you can pick back up. ### Camera moves the model actually obeys The camera move the director chose isn't decoration — it **leads the generation prompt**. Every shot's prompt opens with an explicit camera direction (for example, *"Camera: fast lateral tracking move."*) because video models weight the start of a prompt hardest — so a planned dolly actually dollies instead of getting lost at the tail of a paragraph. The move's intensity sets its speed word (slow / steady / fast), and on re-shoots the camera direction is re-stated with an explicit ban on regressing to a locked-off static shot. ### Honest per-shot QA — and retries that fix the actual miss Every produced clip is critiqued against CoreReflex's **15-point publishing-readiness checklist** — the gap between amateur and professional AI video. A single raw shot is judged on the **eight checks a clip can actually earn on its own**: - **Audio (4):** every word clear, no competing music or noise, natural (not robotic) delivery, consistent levels with no clipping. - **Visual (4):** consistent lighting, consistent character identity (same face, hair, wardrobe), no AI artifacts (warped hands, morphing, stray text), smooth motion with no stutter. (The remaining message and conversion checks describe a *finished* film — copy, call to action — and are scored on the assembled cut, not on raw footage.) The critique comes from a **real analysis of the actual footage** — an AI reviewer watches the clip — never from wishful thinking. That honesty cuts both ways: - A shot that clears the bar (roughly 6 of its 8 checks) is kept and never re-run. - A shot that misses the bar gets **re-shot with the correction written into the prompt** — and the correction targets the *specific* miss, not a vague "do better." A lighting miss re-locks the key and fill so color temperature and exposure hold; an identity miss re-locks the character's face, hair, and wardrobe; an artifact miss enumerates the exact failure modes to avoid (extra fingers, morphing edges, stray text); a motion miss demands smooth, continuous movement. Continuity, identity, pacing, and the original creative intent are explicitly preserved through every retry. - A clip that *couldn't* be analyzed is marked **unscored** — accepted, but never claimed as a QA pass. CoreReflex does not fabricate passing grades. In the editor front door, you see this critique live: each landed slate card carries a **QA chip** (*QA ✓*, *QA ⚠* with a count, or *QA ✕*), with the specific findings in its tooltip, and the final summary line tells you whether the film is **all QA-clear** or how many shots carry warnings. Automatic re-shoots run when the film pipeline executes server-side — through the [AI Agent](ai-agent.md), a workflow recipe, or the platform API; in the editor's interactive flow you see the QA verdicts and choose what to fix yourself with [Recreate with AI](#recreate-any-clip). ### Native resolution — no silent upscaling CoreReflex doesn't pass off an upscaled 1080p clip as something it isn't — the resolution you see is the resolution that was generated. Your footage also lands on your own infrastructure rather than on a third-party aggregator, so nothing about your production leaves your fleet. > **Heads-up on credits:** On a metered (paid) workspace, each shot consumes generation credits, so a five-shot film produces (at least) five clips' worth of usage — and any shot that gets re-shot adds one more generation. On a free workspace, generation runs without metering. See [Plans & Billing](plans-and-billing.md) for the details. --- ## Refining what comes back Direction is iterative. A few ways to steer the result: - **Re-brief before producing.** If a plan isn't right, sharpen the concept (or switch to Advanced and set the format explicitly) and direct again. Boarding is fast and cheap — it costs nothing to re-plan until the shot list looks right. - **Be specific.** Vague briefs produce generic footage; specific ones produce intentional footage. Name the feeling, the light source, the lens, and the palette. *"A businessman in an office, cinematic"* is a costume rack; *"a weary founder at a cluttered desk, lit by a single warm lamp at 2am, 50mm, shallow focus"* is a shot. - **Produce by hand.** Choose **Edit by hand** to skip auto-production and place clips yourself, or produce the plan and then trim, reorder, and layer freely on the timeline. ### Recreate any clip Any generated clip on your timeline can be regenerated in place. Select the clip, open the **Recreate with AI** panel in the inspector, type a new prompt, and press **Recreate clip**. CoreReflex generates a fresh take and **swaps it into the same spot** on the timeline — same position, new shot. The status line walks the swap: *Preparing source footage → Generating new clip → Adding clip to the timeline.* The Recreate panel gives you two controls: | Control | What it does | |---------|--------------| | **Model** | **Auto** lets CoreReflex route the job, or pin it to **Kling** or **Veo**. | | **Duration** | The new clip's length, **1–30 seconds** (seeded from the clip's current length on the timeline). | This is the fast way to fix one shot without re-running the whole film — reshoot a single beat, try a different model on it, or lengthen a clip that cut too soon. ### Grow, reframe, and mine your footage Three more AI cutting tools live in the editor and pair naturally with a directed film — all covered in [Editing & Mastering](editing-and-mastering.md): - **Extend with AI** — select a clip, optionally describe *what happens next*, and CoreReflex generates a seamless continuation from the clip's own last frame and inserts it right after on the track. The same frame-chaining trick the director uses, on demand. - **Auto-reframe** — one click finds the main subject in a clip and sizes and positions the clip around it. Indispensable after switching a widescreen film to a vertical frame. - **AI highlight clipping** — from a clip's transcript, find the strongest moments and keep just those — the fastest way to mine a long take for its best beat. --- ## A typical workflow 1. From the dashboard, press **New project** (or **Direct film**) — the editor opens with the Director front door. 2. Pick **Easy** (just describe it) or **Advanced** (set format, length, shots, tone). 3. Write your concept and press **Direct my film**. Review the boarded plan — roles, camera moves, continuity markers, and any validation or quality notes. 4. Re-brief until the shot list looks right, then press **Produce all shots**. 5. Watch the shots generate, frame-chain, pick up their QA chips, and tile onto the timeline. 6. **Recreate** any shot that still isn't landing, or **Extend** one that cut too soon. 7. Open the finished cut and move on to [Editing & Mastering](editing-and-mastering.md) — add [voiceover and music](voiceover-and-music.md), grade, transition, and master. 8. Ship it: render the master, cut a vertical short, or [hand the next one to the AI Agent](#hand-the-whole-brief-to-the-ai-agent). --- ## Repurpose your film ### Shorts Studio — one film, one short Once a film is cut, spin it into a vertical short without leaving the dashboard. Open **Shorts Studio** from the **Shorts + captions** card, pick a finished film, choose **9:16** (TikTok / Reels / Shorts) or **1:1** (square feed), and press **Make short**. CoreReflex re-frames the whole timeline with one uniform center-cover scale: every clip — along with its captions, color grade, and audio effects — is carried over verbatim and only the geometry is rewritten, so the short stays exactly as render-faithful as the film it came from. If the source film already has captions, they come along and scale to fit the new frame; add fresh per-clip captions in the editor. The reframed short is a **brand-new project**, queued straight to your fleet's render worker — you watch the render progress right in the studio panel and it finishes as a real, downloadable MP4. The same worker bakes your **4K master** from the **Render Studio**; see [Editing & Mastering](editing-and-mastering.md) for the render walkthrough. Full Shorts details are in [Editing & Mastering](editing-and-mastering.md#shorts-studio). ### Auto-Clips — one long video, many shorts Shorts Studio reframes *one finished film*. **Auto-Clips** goes the other way: hand it one *long* video (a podcast, a webinar, raw footage) and AI finds the strongest moments, ranks them, cuts each to a vertical 9:16 short, captions them in your chosen style, and renders every clip straight into your media library. Open it from the **Auto-Clips** card on the dashboard. Full walkthrough on the [Auto-Clips](auto-clips.md) page. --- ## Hand the whole brief to the AI Agent You don't have to open the director yourself. The **AI Agent** understands the film pipeline as one of its tools — ask it to *"produce a 30-second teaser for our spring launch"* and it plans the work, shows you what it will cost **before anything is spent**, and hands the film brief to this same pipeline: plan → produce → critique → assemble, running in the background while you do something else. It's the same director, the same lock sheets, and the same honest QA — just briefed conversationally, and composable with the agent's other skills (generate a poster, score a track, write the copy) in a single request. See the [AI Agent](ai-agent.md) page for how runs, previews, and approvals work. --- ## Troubleshooting - **"Sign in at corereflex.com first, then reopen the editor."** Your editor session expired or never started. Log in on the dashboard, then reopen the editor tab — one account covers both. - **"The director hit an error. Try again."** Usually transient. Planning is also rate-limited to keep costs sane (about 20 plans per minute), so a burst of rapid re-plans can briefly 429 — wait a few seconds. - **The plan says it was boarded by the offline director.** The AI planner was briefly unavailable, so a simpler templated plan was used — the notice includes the real reason. You can produce it as-is, but if you're about to spend credits, consider re-planning in a minute to get the full AI board. - **A shot shows ✕ failed.** Production stops at the failure point; everything already placed stays on your timeline. Press **Retry production** to pick back up, or **Recreate** the individual clip. - **A shot shows QA ⚠.** Hover the chip to read the specific findings (lighting drift, identity drift, artifacts, motion). Recreate the clip with a sharpened prompt — name the thing that missed. - **Cuts don't flow between two shots.** Frame-chaining is best-effort; when a previous frame can't be extracted, the shot regenerates from text alone. Recreate the second shot — recreation re-chains from the previous clip's last frame. - **The dashboard quick loop's shots have no QA chips.** By design: the in-dashboard Director Studio doesn't score shots, so it marks them *unscored* instead of inventing a grade. Open the assembled cut in the editor to review and recreate. --- ## Related pages - [Editing & Mastering](editing-and-mastering.md) — the timeline, color grade, transitions, captions, Extend with AI, auto-reframe, highlight clipping, Shorts Studio, and rendering your master. - [Auto-Clips](auto-clips.md) — turn one long video into ranked, captioned vertical shorts. - [AI Agent](ai-agent.md) — brief the whole job conversationally and let it run the film pipeline in the background. - [Voiceover & Music](voiceover-and-music.md) — narration and scoring for the finished cut. - [Getting Started](getting-started.md) — accounts, sign-in, and your first film. - [Plans & Billing](plans-and-billing.md) — how generation credits are metered. - [Coming Soon](coming-soon.md) — what's still on the runway (including the Persona lipsync engine).