Story to film is the fastest route through Film Studio. You give it a finished text (a fairy tale, a short story, a screenplay, an ad script) and the studio writes the screenplay, designs the cast, generates every scene with consistent characters, records the voices and cuts the film with music. You make four choices on one screen; the studio makes the hundreds of small decisions a crew would normally make. This guide walks through those choices, what happens after you press the button, and where the review points are.
Before you start: the text
The director works from what you paste, so the text is the most important input. It does not need to be formatted. Headings, markdown, notes and chat lines such as "if you want I can rewrite this" are stripped automatically; dialogue and events are kept. What helps most is dialogue in quotation marks with the speaker nearby, narration in the past tense, one idea per paragraph. The director keeps events, people, order and dialogue as written and does not invent facts, so an ambiguous paragraph becomes an ambiguous scene.
The four choices
- Story. Paste the text as it is. Any language works; narration and spoken lines are produced in the story's language, while visual prompts are written in English internally.
- Visual style. Eight styles: Anime, 3D animation, Watercolor, Comic book, Cinematic realism, 1960s Yeşilçam, Ink wash, Pastel. The style drives both the cast sheets and every scene prompt, so the film looks like one piece from the first frame to the last.
- Length. Auto suggests a length from the text, using about nine characters of narration per second. One minute and three minutes are fixed targets; Full story follows the text. The wizard warns when the chosen length is too short for the story.
- Quality and director. Draft and Standard use faster video models; Cinema and Cinema Pro use slower, richer ones. Professional and Premium directors read the story with different language models; Premium keeps more nuance in long texts.
Two smaller controls: the narrator voice (pick one from the list, or leave it automatic) and the aspect ratio, which is fixed per film; for a vertical version, produce a second film from the same text rather than cropping.
What the studio does next
- Screenplay. The director produces a title, a logline, a style guide, the cast with looks and voice profiles, a music brief, and the scenes: synopsis, visual prompt, duration, who is on screen, one spoken line and the narration. The result is checked field by field; problems go back to the director once as a list before the film proceeds.
- Cast. Every cast member gets a character sheet in your style, up to five per film. Non-human characters stay non-human: a firefly is drawn as a firefly, not as a person in a costume.
- Scenes. Each scene with a character first gets a keyframe built from the character sheets and the scene prompt, then the keyframe is animated by the video model. This is what keeps faces and costumes stable across scenes.
- Voices. Narration is recorded per scene with the narrator voice you chose. Spoken lines are voiced by a voice matched to the character's gender and age, and lip-synced onto the clip where lip-sync is available.
- Editing. Clips, narration, dialogue and music are mixed into one MP4, with the music ducked under speech so words stay clear.
Review before you spend
Only the screenplay and the cast sheets are charged up front. When the cast is ready the film waits in the Ready state with the full production price shown, computed from the real scenes rather than an estimate. This is the moment to look at the cast sheets, read the scene list and change anything you do not like: rewrite a prompt, edit a spoken line, adjust a duration, remove a scene.
If you ticked "produce without waiting for approval", production starts by itself the moment the cast is done. That is convenient for texts you have already run once and trust; for a new story, leave it unticked and use the Ready screen.
What to check on the Ready screen
- Do the cast sheets look like the characters you imagined? A wrong sheet is cheap to fix now and expensive to fix after thirty scenes reference it.
- Is every spoken line attached to a character who is on screen in that scene?
- Does the scene count match the length you wanted? A one-minute target should give roughly six to eight scenes.
- Is the price line what you expected? Your plan multiplier is already applied.
After production
The finished film appears on its page with a player. From there you can download the MP4, send it to Cinema Studio for a longer cut, share it on The Wall, or open a single scene card and press Regenerate. Only the scenes you touch are charged again; the rest of the film is re-edited around them.
Frequently asked
Can I edit the scenes? Yes. Every scene card stays editable before and after production: prompt, duration, characters, spoken line. Regenerate a single scene without touching the others.
Which languages work? Any language the story is written in. Narration and lines are produced in the story's language; visual prompts are always English internally.
What is charged before I confirm? The director run and up to five character sheets. Unused sheet slots are refunded automatically, and anything that fails on our side is returned to the wallet.
How long does it take? The screenplay and cast take minutes; production takes longer because every scene is a video generation. The job strip shows progress, and you can leave the page.