Film Production

Film Production is where your screenplay becomes a real video. You can run production manually (one asset at a time) or agentically — letting the system generate every character, location, and shot end-to-end while you watch progress live.

Getting to Film Production

Three ways to start:

  • From Campaign Studio — After generating a screenplay, click Open in Film Production on the screenplay card. The project is created automatically with all storyboard data already loaded.
  • From the Film Production page — Click New Project and upload a storyboard JSON file. You can also click Load Example to try a sample storyboard without your own file.
  • From the Dashboard — The Film Production section lists your six most recent projects. Click any card to resume.

The Production Kickoff Modal

Whenever you open a freshly created project, the Production Kickoff dialog asks four questions:

  1. Workflow — Choose Manual Film Production to step through every asset yourself, or Agentic Film Production (recommended) to let the system run the whole pipeline automatically.
  2. Aspect Ratio — 16:9 (landscape, for YouTube and widescreen playback) or 9:16 (vertical, for Shorts, Reels, and TikTok).
  3. Visual Style — One project-wide look applied to every generated image and video. Options:
    • Photorealistic — Natural skin textures, physically plausible lighting.
    • Animated 3D — Stylized 3D look with clean geometry and cinematic rendering.
    • Cartoon — Bold cartoon style with simplified forms, clean outlines, vivid color.
    • Sketch — Hand-drawn style with visible linework and minimal photoreal cues.
  4. Agentic Mode (only when Workflow = Agentic) — Sequential generates one phase at a time for tighter continuity, or Parallel (recommended) generates items concurrently to finish faster.

Click Start Production to kick off generation.

Manual Production: The Five Steps

Manual production walks through five steps. You can move backward to revisit earlier steps; each step must be complete before the next unlocks.

Upload → Characters → Locations → Shots → Complete → Editor

Step 1: Upload (JSON projects only)

If you're coming from Campaign Studio, this step is already done. For standalone projects, drop your storyboard JSON file into the upload area.

Step 2: Characters

A card per character in your screenplay. Each card shows the character name and a short description, then auto-generates an image from those traits combined with the project's visual style.

  • Regenerate any image you're not happy with.
  • Toggle Skip image for characters that don't need a visual (off-screen narrators, voice-over).
  • Once every character is generated or skipped, Continue to Locations activates.

Character images use a 4:3 portrait-friendly aspect ratio.

Step 3: Locations

When you enter this step, you may briefly see a "Normalizing locations" message — the AI is grouping similar scene locations together (e.g., "Office - Day" and "Office - Night" become a single "Office" location).

Each location card auto-generates a 16:9 reference image. Regenerate or skip as needed, then click Continue to Shots.

Step 4: Shots

This is the most detailed step. Each shot in your screenplay is presented one at a time, and you generate three things for it: a start frame (image), an end frame (image), and a video clip.

The screen has two panels:

Left panel — Shot details:

  • Shot type (Close-Up, Wide Shot, etc.), duration, action description, and dialogue.
  • An editable video prompt that the AI uses for video generation.
  • The Director's Chair — a collapsible plain-language input that translates a quick instruction (e.g., "slow push-in toward her face") into camera direction added to the prompt. Click Reset history to clear previous director instructions.
  • Reference assets — character and location images shown as thumbnails. You can also upload custom reference images for this specific shot.
  • @mentions — type @ in the prompt to insert a character, location, or prop from your Library, or @Brand… to reference a brand asset uploaded in Campaign Studio.

Right panel — Generation area:

  • Start Frame — Click Generate to create the opening image of this shot. Uses the shot prompt combined with reference images.
  • End Frame — Click Generate to create the closing image. Optional but improves video quality with start-end mode.
  • Video Generation — Where the actual clip is created.
    • Model — Veo 3.1 (faster generation, preset durations) or Kling 3.0 (different style, slider durations; prompts are auto-optimized for Kling using cinematic principles).
    • Mode — Image to Video extends the start frame into motion; Start-End to Video interpolates between your start and end frames for smoother, more predictable results.
    • Click Generate Video to create the clip. Progress shows as a percentage.

Navigating between shots: Use the Previous and Next buttons at the top. The counter (e.g., "3 / 12") shows your position.

Tip: You don't have to generate every shot before moving on. Generate the key shots and come back later for the rest.

When you're ready, click Finish & Export to advance to the editor.

Step 5: Complete

A brief review confirming your assets are ready. From here, click through to the Video Editor.

Agentic Production

When you choose Agentic Film Production in the kickoff modal, CookFlix opens a live monitoring page that runs the whole pipeline for you. Phases run in this order:

  1. Characters (~15% of overall progress)
  2. Locations (~15%)
  3. Shots (~70%)

While a run is active you'll see:

  • A progress bar showing overall percent complete.
  • A current phase badge (Characters / Locations / Shots) with the current item index and total.
  • Generated assets appearing as cards in real time, marked accepted, rejected, or skipped.
  • A scrollable activity log with timestamped events.

Use the Cancel button to stop the run early; held credits are released. When the run completes, you can jump straight into the Video Editor.

Re-doing Production

From the Dashboard's Film Production list, the Re-do action on any project opens a modal with two restart options:

  • Restart from scratch — Clears all generated assets and editor timeline state, resets the project to the Characters phase, then starts a fresh run.
  • Continue with existing assets — Keeps everything that was generated successfully and reruns only the missing or stale parts.

Use this when you've changed brand assets, swapped the visual style, or want to take another pass at a project.

Next Step

Once your shots are generated, head to the Video Editor to arrange everything on a timeline and export your final video.