scene-splitter

Scene Splitter

Takes a plain English story and produces a numbered list of scenes — each scene being one moment that gets exactly one illustration and one narration clip downstream.

This is the upstream spine of the AI Storybook pipeline. Splitting once here and feeding both the illustrator and the narrator from the same {slug}_scenes.json keeps everything in lockstep: image N pairs with audio N pairs with paragraph N. No drift, no negotiation between skills.

When this skill applies

The user has an English story and wants to prepare it for the illustration + narration pipeline. Common phrasings: "split this into scenes", "break this into pages", "prepare this story for the storybook", "make scenes for illustration".

The skill does NOT apply to:

• Stories that need only narration OR only images standalone (the illustrator and narrator can split on their own when used independently)
• Non-narrative content (essays, instructions, lists)

Architectural rule: one scene = one moment = one image = one narration clip

A scene is a single moment that fits one illustration. Operationally, a new scene starts at any of:

• Action transition — a different action happens
• Scene change — a different location or a significant time jump
• Emotional turn — joy → fear, calm → urgency, doubt → resolve
• Character entry/exit — someone new appears or leaves the moment
• Dialogue beat — a meaningful line of speech that deserves its own picture

Scenes are deliberately short and many. The storybook player renders one scene at a time, and the text MUST fit on a phone screen without scrolling. That drives the hard length cap below.

Reading level + length cap (beginner default)

This pipeline targets beginner readers. The cap is screen-fit-driven, not API-driven:

Level	Per-scene hard cap	Target scene count
beginner (default)	240 characters	8–12 scenes

The cap is the number of characters in a single scene's text. Keep most scenes well under it (~120–180 chars reads best on a phone). To scale this pipeline up for longer/harder stories, raise the cap and the target count here — nothing downstream needs to change.