Director Mode

1. Step in.Open Director Mode from the Video Creator Canvas toolbar or the Director Mode banner in chat's video mode. The landing plays a slow loop of cinematic footage under a black mist — type or dictate your opening shot in the left column.

2. Watch Take 1 roll. Clips are 3–10 seconds at 720p with native audio, and usually land in about a minute. The stage keeps the room alive while it renders.

3. Direct the change. On set, the take fills the whole room and the composer stays right where it was on the landing — type the next note and the new take carries over the scene, characters, and physics from the take it edits, applying only your change.

Edits work best as one focused change per take: "Change the lighting to golden hour." "Make the umbrella red." "Slow the camera push." Ending with "Keep everything else the same" pins the rest of the scene in place.

For a fresh generation, describe the subject, action, setting, camera move, and mood. Want one continuous shot? Say "single continuous shot, no cuts."

Direct the sound too. Takes render with native audio, so describe it: "Audio: rain on glass, distant thunder, no music." Say "no dialogue" when you want a silent performance. For text inside the shot, put it in quotes: "a neon sign that reads ‘OPEN LATE’."

Time the beats. Timestamp ranges choreograph the clip: "[0-3s] establish the scene. [3-6s] the key action. [6-8s] hold on the final frame." The sparkle in the composer holds these pro tips — tap one to drop it straight into your note. And when you'd rather not structure it yourself, tap the wand: Theo rewrites your note the way the engine reads best, with a one-tap Undo and nothing sent until you roll it.

Need more room? When a note grows past a few lines, an Expand button appears in the composer — it opens the writing room, a full-size page for detailed scripts and beat sheets. Drop a .md or .txt file to import it straight into the note, keep attaching images and characters from the footer, and press ⌘/Ctrl+Enter to roll the take. Closing the room keeps your draft.

When your workspace has the premium tier enabled, two tabs rise off the composer's top-left edge. Flash is the fast, conversational default: takes land quickest, and an edit re-renders the same shot with just your change — built for rapid back-and-forth iteration, and the lightest on credits.

Cinemais the premium tier: sharper fidelity, richer native audio, and longer shots (up to ~15 seconds) with multi-shot pacing. Cinema edits work differently — instead of re-rendering the same shot from memory, the engine watches the prior take's actual footage and applies your change on top of it, preserving the motion, camera work, characters, and setting. That makes it the strongest choice when characters or reference images anchor the scene. Cinema takes render more slowly and cost about 4× the credits of a Flash take.

Set the length & quality. With Cinema selected, a settings button appears in the composer's controls row showing your current pick (for example 720p · Auto). Open it to choose the quality — 480p, 720p, 1080p, or 4K — and the length — Auto (the engine paces the shot) or a fixed 4–15 seconds. Higher resolutions and longer clips look better but render more slowly and cost more credits (1080p is about 2× a 720p take; 4K is the most, and the slowest). Your pick rides each take, so a reopened production and a retried take both remember it.

Mix freely. The pick is per take: switch engines mid-production any time, and either engine can edit takes rendered by the other. Takes made on Cinema carry a small Cinema chip in the thread, a reopened production defaults to the engine you used last, and the ⓘ tab beside the toggle holds this same guide right on set.

A quiet thread of takes lives right under the composer — newest first, older takes fading away as the story grows. Click any take to screen it, download it, or unmute its audio. Nothing is overwritten: a bad note never costs you a good take.

Preview the full frame. Everything happens in the Immersive room — the take plays edge-to-edge across the whole canvas. Tap Preview (top-right, on desktop) to screen the selected take uncropped at full quality on an elegant centered screen — ringed by mood lighting sampled live from the footage itself, like a bias light behind a television. Esc drops you straight back on set.

Edit from any take. Hover a finished take and hit the pencil to make it the base for your next direction — perfect for branching ("actually, go back to Take 2 and try it at night"). Each scene holds up to 30 takes; your five most recent productions sit on the landing, and See all opens the full library in a drawer.

Name your production. The title starts as your first direction — double-click it (or tap the pencil) in the top bar to rename it. The new name follows the production everywhere: on set, on the landing shelf, and in the library drawer.

Clean up the shelf. Hover a production card and tap the trash twice to delete it (the second tap confirms), or use the trash pill on set to delete the production you're in. Deleting removes every take with it.

The scene strip above the composer turns one shot into a full production. Tap + Sceneto open the next scene (up to 200 per production), click a chip to focus it, double-click to rename it ("Opening shot", "The reveal"), and use the arrows on the active chip to reorder. Each scene keeps its own takes — up to 30 — so you can iterate every moment independently.

Continue into the next scene. Tap + Sceneand the new scene picks up from the current scene's chosen take: Theo grabs that take's final frame as the visual starting point and carries the same characters, setting, lighting, and style into the next moment — then layers your new direction on top. A "Continuing from…"chip sits above the composer (it shows a brief "capturing…" while it grabs the frame). Open the chip to pick a different scene to follow — say, jump Scene 3 back to Scene 1 — or clear it with ✕ to start the scene fresh.

Star the keeper. In the take thread, tap the star on the take you want that scene to contribute. Unstarred scenes automatically use their newest finished take, so a playthrough is always ready.

Play it through. With two or more playable scenes, Playscreens the whole production as one continuous sequence — each scene's chosen take, dissolving smoothly from one to the next, with a scene rail to jump around.

Take it with you. Downloadexports every scene's chosen take, numbered in order ("01 — Opening shot.mp4"…) — up to 30 scenes arrive as a single zip; bigger productions download file by file. Drop them straight into any editor to finish your ad, trailer, or film.

Found a character you love in a take? Tap the person icon on the playing take, drag a box around them on the frozen frame, give them a name, and they're saved to your character library — the exact pixels, not a description.

Bring them back. The people icon in the composer previews your three most recent characters — tap See all to open the full library, on the landing or right on set. From the library you can rename, delete, or use a character: on the landing that starts a fresh story; on set it stages them for the next take. Staged characters count toward the three-image limit.

Their whole sheet anchors the take. When a staged character has Character Studio turnaround views (full body, side, back, portrait), every angle rides along to the render automatically — one staged card, full-sheet consistency from any camera position — while still using just one of your three image slots.

The cast, on set. The Casttab on the right edge of any production lists everyone who has appeared in it — how many takes they're in, with quick actions to stage them again or add someone new from your library. Remove from scene rolls a fresh take of the current scene without them: the character is erased and everything else stays the same, and nothing already shot is lost.

Every character you save gets a cinematic hero asset rendered automatically: your exact character re-lit on a dark studio backdrop, like a movie poster. Tap Open Character Studio on the save toast (or the wand on any library card) to step onto their own set. The character fills the room edge-to-edge, with your tools docked along the bottom, the same immersive feel as directing takes. Your original capture stays untouched: it's always the first tile on the sheet and the face of the character everywhere; generated assets never replace it.

The character sheet. Render the hero plus the full continuity turnaround (portrait, full body, back, and side profile), every view locked to your original character so you (and the engine) can hold them from every angle. Every render is explicit: tap an empty tile to generate it, hover a filled one to regenerate or delete it, and tap any asset to put it on the stage. If a render drifts too far from your character, the studio discards it instead of saving a stranger; run it again.

Give them a voice. The voice chip in the top bar (or the Voices tab on the right edge) opens the audition drawer. Browse by Male / Femaleand by style — Commanding, Calm & steady, Warm, Smooth, Energetic, Dark & mysterious. Tap any row to hear a short in-character audition, then tap Use to give it to your character; their current voice stays pinned at the top with a one-tap Remove. The voice rides along on every take the character is staged in, guiding how they sound in the rendered audio.

Identity notes. Tap the note chip in the top bar to keep a line or two about the character — wardrobe, personality, era ("always in a red leather jacket, dry humor"). Notes fold into every take they appear in, so those details genuinely shape renders across productions.

Create variants. Type (or dictate) a change into the composer at the bottom, like "winter coat", "battle-worn", or "gala tuxedo", or attach an image of the look you want them to take on; their identity stays locked while the styling follows your reference. The preview shows the original and the variant side by side so drift is obvious at a glance — then Save as new character. Variants join the cast strip beside the base character, each independently stageable in your takes.

Keep it tidy. Hover any filled sheet tile to download the asset, and use the trash pill in the top bar to delete a variant (the base stays) or retire the whole character — the second tap confirms.

Use in Project. One tap opens a centered picker of your productions — living thumbnails that play each one's latest take — plus a Start a new production tile. Pick a destination and the character arrives already staged in the composer, their full character sheet anchoring every take.

You can bring your OWN clip onto the set. Tap the clapperboardin the composer (or drop a file straight onto it) to add an MP4, MOV, or WebM clip — up to 100 MB and about 15 seconds. The clip lands in the scene as an Uploaded take: playable immediately, free to register, and never modified or re-encoded.

Then direct it like any other take: "make it rain", "swap the car for a bike", "relight it as golden hour". Each note renders a NEW ~10-second take built from your footage — your original stays untouched as a base you can always branch from, and every follow-up edit chains conversationally exactly like generated takes.

• Short clips work best. Edits render as ~10s takes, so a tight source clip is what the studio can faithfully rework end to end.
• Capture characters from it. Pause your uploaded clip on the stage and use the capture button to save anyone in it to your character library — then stage them in brand-new scenes and productions.
• Continue its story. Start the next scene from your clip and Director Mode carries its final frame forward as the visual anchor.
• Region note. In some regions the engine can't edit uploaded footage yet (generated takes still edit everywhere) — you'll see a clear message if that applies to you.

Director Mode is rolling out gradually and runs on a preview engine — output is 720p today, and clips top out at ~10 seconds. In some regions, editing applies only to takes generated inside Director Mode (not to footage you upload). Occasional retakes are part of the craft: if a note lands oddly, run it again or rephrase.