← Spiral How it works

Departments are data

Seven rows in a table (what each owns, what binds it, what its critic asks) and why the nine on paper became seven in the build.

you · three jobs choose the treatment · answer what can't be guessed · judge the takes a fourth when a disagreement outlives its rounds: decide

producer · owns the brief the only channel to you subscribed to every ASK and every cost · guesses what is cheap to undo

director · owns the vision + spine rules, never writes subscribed to every FLAG and OFFER · uphold, modify, dismiss

one writer Story owns the script

one writer Look & Cast owns the bibles

one writer Camera owns the shot list

one writer Sound owns the audio timeline

one writer Unit + Edit owns the cut

the production diary · append-only gate.opened · dept.woke · artifact.committed · flag.raised · ruling.issued · guess.taken · offer.made · asset.rejected every event carries its actor, its cause and its cost · every screen is a projection of it · nothing is ever edited

Seven departments, one harness. No department messages another: it writes its own artifact, flags anyone else's against a lock, and the Director rules. Everything lands in the log first; the board, the margins, the call sheet and the dailies are views of it.

None of the seven is a special case in the code. A department is a row: the one artifact it owns, the locks it subscribes to, and the question its critic asks. The gates are a table too. One harness runs every row.

The rows

Department	Owns	Subscribes to	The critic’s question
Producer	the Brief	every ASK, every cost	What is missing, blocked, or over budget?
Director	the Vision, the spine	the Brief · every FLAG and OFFER	Does this serve the film?
Story	the Script	vision · spine · bibles · audio timeline	Does it hold, is it true, is it earned?
Look & Cast	the Look & Character Bible	vision · script	Same person in every shot? On-style and on-world?
Camera	the Shot List	script · bibles · spine	Does the coverage tell the scene? Is it generatable?
Sound & Music	the Audio Timeline	vision · spine · script · shot list	One sonic world? Does the music carry the arc?
Unit + Edit	the Cut	shot list · bibles · audio timeline	Technically clean, faithful to spec, and does it play?

Subscriptions grow at later gates: once a render sheet exists, every critic binds to it, and the Director watches dailies. That is one more table.

What churns and what does not

Everything that changes as the models improve lives in prompts versioned as data: a mandate per department per gate, an output shape per task, a word cap per gate. Camera’s mandate at pre-production says what a shot list entry contains and that a prompt is under 35 words; at production it says Camera critiques the render sheet against its own shot list. Rewriting those is editing text. The substrate under them (the wake, the log, the projections, the convergence rule) has not changed since the first gate worked.

Nine to seven

the design · nine

Producer
Director
Story
Characters
Art
Camera
Sound
Unit
Editorial

the build · seven

Producer
Director
Story
Look & Cast Characters + Art — on a short film, whose clothes these are is one question about the person and the world
Camera
Sound & Music
Unit + Edit Unit + Editorial — nothing renders inside the council, so the editor’s job at production is to write the sheet the human renders from

Both merges are a data change. Splitting them again is adding two rows back.

The design document has nine departments. The build has seven because on a ten-second film two pairs were the same conversation, and because nothing renders inside the council, so a render unit and an editor have one job between them at production: write the sheet the human renders from.

The script decides which shots exist

The first version let two departments each believe they owned the list of shots. Story wrote scenes with shots; Camera wrote a shot list; the shot list acquired entries the script never had, and the render sheet prompted them. Now the script is the source of truth for which shots exist. The shot list is checked against it, never the other way round. A projection names the drift on the board (shot list has 3C, which the script does not) and the human can waive it or send Story back. Enforced by a projection, not by a prompt asking everyone to be careful.