ralphy: Skill for Claude Code

Art director playbook

Read this when: "generate prompts", "generate assets", "make images / video / VO / music", "regenerate scene-XX ", "try a different model", "A/B variant", "how much will it cost".

Anchor order discipline (every multi-scene project):

1. Location-master-plate first — for any project where ≥2 scenes share a setting, generate the room / location plate as anchor #1, BEFORE any character or scene anchor. Pass the plate as --ref alongside character masters on every subsequent scene gen. Skipping this cost noski-people-001 $0.45 image-regen + 45 min user-feedback loop ("in every shot they're sitting on a different couch and I asked for the same one" — three different couches across three anchors). For ≥25-scene projects, the plate alone isn't enough — generate ≥3 unique anchor angles per recurring subject (location, hero character, hero product). Full discipline + CLI shape + worked example: art-director/location-plate.md. This is the single highest-leverage rule in this playbook.
2. Character / persona masters second — one per cast member, each generated with the location plate as --ref. Pass both (location + character) on every downstream scene gen to lock identity + setting.
3. Scene anchors third — scene-01 first, surfaced to user → wait → scene-02 → wait → … only batch 4-6 anchors at a time AFTER two solo gens land with user approval.
4. i2v / video generation last — never i2v an unapproved scene anchor.

Photoreal-human projects: read art-director/photoreal-humans.md before drafting prompts — TV-commercial register (Tom-Ford / chiaroscuro / marble) is the wrong default for natural-feeling UGC; use Sony A7 IV + Sigma 35/85mm + Kodak Portra 400 still-photo register instead. Venom-bodywash-001 burned ~$3 on this miscalibration.

Aesthetic-lock checkpoint (HARD gate, applies before anchor fan-out): after the location-master-plate (anchor #1) and the character master(s) (anchor #2) are approved by the user, the agent MUST (a) name the register in one phrase ("still-photo candid documentary" / "Old-Spice high-key commercial" / "liminal-spaces analog-horror" / "CGI translucent specimen" / etc. — taxonomy at the top of photoreal-humans.md), (b) run the character-fit.md check (clean mascot + gritty register? pick reinterpret / distressed-variant / shift-register BEFORE fan-out), (c) write the one-line aesthetic-lock string into STORYBOARD.md, and (d) generate one cover per register and surface it to the user. Refuse to fan out scene anchors until the cover is approved. Skipping this is the documented cause of ralphy-vs-higgsfield-001's three-register shipping defect (Lesson #7) and ralphy-carousel-001's clean-ghost-in-punk drift (postmortem #2). When in doubt about which register applies, run ralphy ref pull <one-canonical-url> --frames and READ the frames — do NOT scrape-summarize (biofix-hypnic-en-001 defect class).

Model drift handling: read art-director/regeneration.md — one retry max on a kling/seedance prompt that misses; then redesign the scene, don't fight model basins. Glitter-cream-001 lost 2× $0.42 fighting "jar near cheek → powder compact" drift across 3 retries.

Between "scenario approved" and "assets on disk for the editor" — that's my zone. Prompt engineering, API orchestration, single-slot regeneration, A/B variants, cost discipline. Never invent model-id from memory — always cross-check MODELS.md.

STOP rule. Every model call goes through ralphy generate. No raw fetch / curl / bunx tsx against a media API — gen-log + asset-manifest + cost rollup all depend on the CLI. AGENTS invariant #2.