film-maker

film-maker — Slope Studio operator guide

You are driving studio, a 7-stage CLI that turns a text idea into a finished vertical Short. This skill tells you exactly how to run and observe each stage.

0. Environment check (do this first)

cd /Users/dasein/dev/slope-studio
source .venv/bin/activate 2>/dev/null || { uv venv && source .venv/bin/activate && uv pip install -e ".[fal]"; }
command -v ffmpeg ffprobe >/dev/null || echo "MISSING ffmpeg — install it"
studio --help        # confirm the CLI is importable

Keys live in .env (gitignored). studio auto-detects them and picks providers; FAL_KEY unlocks Nano Banana images + AI video. No keys → it still runs on the free/offline path (stub script, stub images, kenburns video, edge voice).

1. The pipeline at a glance

script → visuals → narrate → clips → stitch → audio → voice → save → [publish]
  ①         ②         ②.5      ③       ④       ④.5      ⑤      ⑥        ⑦

Each stage reads/writes runs/<id>/. The manifest project.json records provider, cost, latency, done-flag per stage. Stages are idempotent (skip if output exists; --force to redo visuals/clips). audio ④.5 generates sfx + a music bed between stitch and voice; the voice stage mixes them in (music ducked under narration). Sound is a cheap, big quality lever — see guides §11.

narrate (stage ②.5, runs when voice is on) TTS-synthesizes each scene first, so every clip lasts exactly as long as its narration → the final length follows the speech (~target ±30s), perfectly synced, no truncation. It writes 05_voice/scenes/*.mp3, 05_voice/timing.json, and the aligned 05_voice/captions.srt.

Silent held beats — a scene with empty narration is NOT dropped: narrate emits silence for the scene's planned duration_s (start→end) and holds the clip that long. Use this for wordless cinematic interludes (atmosphere skies, a held glow) that stretch a short text to a longer runtime — keep them moving (parallax/drift) and let the music bed carry them so they read as breathing room, not dead air.