Cinema Vertical

The Cinema vertical turns a script, treatment, or concept into governed pre-production assets — storyboard frames and animatic video clips — through a multi-stage pipeline.

Pipeline stages

The pre-production workflow moves through six stages, each with its own model preference, collaboration mode, and governance rules:

Script Analysis — a local model reads the script and produces a structured analysis: tone, genre, settings, characters, pacing, and production notes. Runs autonomously and auto-advances.

Scene Breakdown — a capable model breaks the analysis into discrete shots, each with scene heading, shot type, action description, visual description (suitable for image generation prompts), duration estimate, and transition type. The operator reviews and approves before advancing.

Visual Direction — the operator sets the visual language manually: color palette, lens feel, aspect ratio, style references, continuity notes. This is a human-authored stage — no generation, just creative direction that governs everything downstream.

Storyboard Generation — a cloud image model generates one frame per shot, using the visual description from the breakdown and the direction from the previous stage. Frames are stored as an asset manifest. The operator can approve, reject, or regenerate individual frames.

Animatic Generation — a cloud video model animates each storyboard frame into a short clip (3-10 seconds). Motion follows the action description from the breakdown. Clips are stored as a second asset manifest.

Assembly — a local process generates FFmpeg commands to concatenate clips with transitions and produce a rough-cut MP4.

Cost governance

Cinema routes image and video tasks to cloud providers (Replicate, Runway) with per-stage cost governance. Daily spend caps throttle media-heavy days before the global circuit breaker fires. A typical full pipeline run costs approximately $6-7 in cloud API calls for a 12-shot sequence.

Storyboard manifests

The storyboard stage generates one asset per shot and assembles them into a manifest — a JSON array of entries with paths, shot IDs, prompts, and provider metadata. If later shots fail, Torque preserves successful frames and records the partial error. The operator can regenerate failed frames individually.

Shortcut workflows

In addition to the full pipeline, Cinema includes shortcut workflows: storyboard-only (generate frames from an existing breakdown) and animatic-only (generate clips from existing frames). These let operators re-enter the pipeline at any stage.