Logline to episode

The drafter reads your logline the way a writers room reads a pitch. It looks for a protagonist, a want, a complication and a setting, and it builds a scene list that moves through them. Loglines that name a concrete place and a concrete pressure produce the strongest drafts: a night manager, a guest under a false name, ten minutes before someone comes looking. The more specific the sentence, the less the drafter has to invent.

Vague loglines still work, but they produce generic scenes. "Two people argue about the past" will draft; "a record-shop owner finds a message carved into a trade-in and recognises the handwriting of a customer who vanished years ago" drafts something you would actually watch.

The output of drafting is structured, not prose. Each scene carries a line of two or three sentences describing what the camera sees and one spoken line in quotes, a cast of up to three characters chosen from your library, one set, an optional prop and a duration between four and fifteen seconds. The durations add up to the length you picked.

The drafter also writes a title, a short synopsis and a cliffhanger. The cliffhanger matters more than it looks: when you draft the next episode in the same series, it is passed back in so the new episode opens where the last one stopped.

Each scene is rendered as one continuous take by a video model, so the drafter writes for that constraint. One location per scene, at most three people on screen, action that resolves inside fifteen seconds, a single line of dialogue rather than an exchange. Scenes written this way render cleanly; scenes that try to cut between two rooms do not.

That is also why the drafter prefers more scenes over longer ones for a two-minute episode: nine to twelve short takes read as pace, while five long ones read as a slideshow.

You never see a raw model prompt. Each take is built from the scene line plus reference images for the cast members, their outfits, the set and the prop, with a short house style clause for vertical framing and natural room audio. The references are what keep a character consistent from the elevator in scene two to the lobby in scene seven.

Every take is submitted at the same time. For a two-minute episode that means twelve renders in flight at once rather than twelve in a row, which is the difference between a coffee break and an afternoon.

The logline is stored with the episode, so you can always see what the episode was drafted from. If a draft went somewhere unexpected, the fix is usually one word in the logline rather than a dozen edits in the scene list. Re-drafting costs two credits, so iterating on the sentence is the cheapest part of the process.

Series carry a logline too. When you attach an episode to an existing series, the series premise and the earlier synopses are both read by the drafter, which is how a one-line pitch grows into a season without you writing a bible.