director

Director — Story-to-Video Production Pipeline

Overview

The Director skill runs a complete short film production from a text story. It breaks the story into scenes, generates start/end frames for each, creates video clips from frame pairs, and concatenates everything into a final video.

The pipeline runs Story Planning → Z-Image Hero + Character Refs → Qwen Edit Chain (all frames) → WAN 2.2 FLF Video Clips → ffmpeg Concatenation.

Key architectural decisions:

• 1 hero frame + edit chain for character consistency (NEVER independent Z-Image per scene)
• Inter-scene frame continuity. Scene N's end frame IS Scene N+1's start frame (same image file, no edit gap)
• Character reference images fed into Qwen Edit's extra image slots
• State file persists to disk for context compaction survival
• Each scene is independently retryable without affecting others
• clear_vram between every model family switch

CRITICAL: Inspect modes + verify every output

This pipeline drives the user's live canvas across many stages, so two habits are non-negotiable:

• Inspect node modes before each render. After loading any pack/template/subgraph and before panel_run, check each node's mode (panel_graph_outline marks [bypass]/[mute]; panel_query_graph detail rows carry it). A bypass node is skipped (passes input through); a mute node and everything downstream don't execute. If the path, branch, or switch you need is bypassed or muted, enable it with panel_set_node_mode (set the wanted node active, the unwanted one bypass/mute). Never assume a switch or route is already active.
• Verify the output matches before moving on. Every Phase-N render is a gate. Look at the produced frame or clip (view it) and confirm it matches the intent BEFORE advancing or reporting progress. If it's wrong, diagnose (wrong prompt path? a bypassed/muted builder or switch? wrong widget? wrong ref image?), fix, and rerun. Do NOT declare a phase done or report progress you haven't verified.
• Confirm VIDEO renders via the filesystem, not /history. For a VHS_VideoCombine / LTX / WAN clip, do NOT rely on get_history / queue (action:"status") to confirm it exists. VHS-style video nodes write the .mp4 but frequently do NOT register an output in ComfyUI's /history (prompt shows done, empty outputs, no error). Confirm the file with get_image (action:"list_outputs") (now lists videos too, tagged kind: "video") by filename_prefix + fresh mtime, then chain it forward with upload_image (action:"stage").
• Bypass completed stages before queuing the next one. If you build the multi-stage pipeline on ONE canvas (e.g. Krea2 → LTX → WAN) rather than running each phase in isolation, once a stage has run and its output is captured/staged, panel_set_node_mode(mode:"bypass") that stage's nodes BEFORE you panel_run the next stage. Otherwise panel_run re-executes the whole graph and you pay for and wait on already-finished work, a real and costly failure mode. Keep only the active stage live; feed the prior output forward with upload_image (action:"stage") (bypass the producer, feed its captured output to the consumer's loader).