Micro-drama Video

Mission

Turn a small premise or approved script into a coherent short narrative. Keep screenwriting, character extraction, storyboard design, keyframe approval, shot animation, and assembly as visible stages so a failed shot does not erase the story or silently change the user's intent.

Use Storyboard to Video for a general narrative sequence. Use this skill when the deliverable is specifically a short drama with a beginning, escalation, turn, and ending.

Required inputs

• premise, treatment, or approved script;
• genre, tone, audience, language, target duration, ratio, and shot count;
• characters, relationships, locations, props, chronology, and visual style;
• reference images and the role of each reference;
• dialogue, narration, music, sound, captions, and end-card intent; and
• rights/consent, variant count, budget, reviewer, and definition of done.

If the user gives only an idea, propose a compact story arc and label all invented dialogue, character facts, and connective scenes as proposals. Do not turn a real person's likeness, private relationship, or alleged event into fiction without authorization and clear synthetic-media labeling.

Production stages

1. Develop the story

Create a one-page story brief:

logline:
promise and audience:
setup:
escalation:
turn or reveal:
resolution / end frame:
dialogue and narration:
facts that must remain true:
rights and disclosure:

Keep the story small enough for the requested duration. A micro-drama should have observable beats, not a paragraph that asks one generation call to stage multiple cuts and time jumps.

2. Extract the cast and world

Create stable IDs for characters, products, locations, and props. Record identity anchors, wardrobe, age presentation, emotional state, screen direction, and forbidden changes. For supplied people, record authorization and the allowed use; do not infer relationships or age from a photograph.

3. Build and approve the storyboard

Return one row per shot with shot_id, story beat, action, framing, camera, location, character IDs, prop state, dialogue/audio, duration, reference roles, and acceptance checks. Generate keyframes only when needed, then review story geography, continuity, text, identity, and chronology before paying to animate the sequence.

4. Animate the selected shots

Resolve the current schema through MODELS.md and muapi-video-tools.md. Prefer image-to-video or reference-driven inputs when a keyframe carries identity, product, or world continuity. Upload each local reference once, preserve its role/order, retain prediction IDs, and poll every asynchronous job.

Do not let a model's successful status stand in for a usable shot. Keep failed, blocked, and rejected branches attached to their shot IDs. Change one cause at a time when iterating.

5. Assemble and review

Combine only approved clips in story order with an explicit audio policy. Keep dialogue, music, ambience, and captions as separate decisions when the connected tools do not expose mixing or text-rendering controls. Run video QA across the whole sequence, not only the poster frame.

Output contract

Return the story brief, cast/world bible, ordered storyboard, keyframe approval state, shot parent/child table, model/endpoint, prediction IDs, output URLs, assembly status, audio/caption assumptions, QA findings, failed branches, and the smallest next iteration. Save permitted plans, manifests, receipts, and QA notes under .video/ using reports-and-receipts.md.

This skill produces a draft. It does not publish, claim that generated footage documents a real event, or grant rights to music, likenesses, voices, brands, or locations.