The AI-native workspace for music videos, commercials, and short-form.
Brief in. Delivered film out. Everything in between is generated, tracked, and signed off in one place.
The problem
A modern director shooting a music video or commercial is paying for, learning, and context-switching across five to eight tools before the camera rolls. A scheduler. A shotlister. A storyboard generator. An asset board. A budget tool. Plus a parallel stack of consumer AI tools — Sora, Runway, Midjourney, Nano Banana — to mock up shots.
None of them know about each other. The shot you mocked up in Midjourney has nothing to do with the shotlist row in StudioBinder, which has nothing to do with the call sheet in Wrap. Continuity, approvals, and version control live in DMs.
The bottleneck in modern filmmaking isn't the camera. It's the gap between intent and reference.
DOPE in one sentence
A single workspace where a brief becomes scenes, shots, characters, locations, blocking, storyboards, photoreal previews and call sheets — and where every change, comment and approval is tracked.
Why now
- Image-gen is cinematic. Nano Banana, Imagen 3, Flux — 2025/26 image models produce production-grade still frames from structured prompts.
- Reasoning is fluent. Claude 4.5 + Sonnet models extract scenes, characters, locations and props from a brief with structured-output reliability suitable for production.
- Short-form has eaten the brief. Brands order one campaign in five aspects (TikTok, Reels, YouTube, IG square, cinema). Generic tools force five reprompts; DOPE generates variants in one pass.
- Music videos are AI-native. Beat-locked cuts, high creative throughput, lean crew — exactly the workflow AI acceleration was built for.
Who it's for
Director-producer hybrids
The filmmakers who pitch, scout, schedule, and shoot themselves. Music video directors, commercial directors with small bench production. They feel the tool fragmentation hardest and ship the most projects per year.
Boutique production companies
3–10 person teams running 4–20 projects per year. They want a producer-readable platform, client approval flows, and exportable deliverables (call sheets, AICP-style budgets).
Creative agencies
Internal art directors and producers who pre-visualise campaigns for clients. Need approval workflows, multi-aspect deliverables, brand-asset tracking.
What DOPE does
Each capability is a product most studios build separately — DOPE binds them together with one shared atom inventory and one project memory.
- 01
Brief → atoms
A treatment becomes a project in 60 seconds.Paste a brief. Claude parses it into scenes, characters, locations, props, with structured fields for visual style, lighting motivation, palette, and director references. Each atom is editable; the parser is honest about ambiguities so the director resolves them, not the AI silently.
- 02
Photoreal preview generation
Nano Banana, prompted by your project.Every shot has a first-frame and last-frame generator that uses your Style Bible (camera body, lens, color grade, era, director references), the scene location plate, character sheets, and prop refs as multimodal inputs to Gemini. Output is a cinematic still that respects identity, lighting and continuity.
- 03
Cross-platform aspect variants
One shot. Five formats. One click.Producers cutting for TikTok + Reels + YouTube + Instagram square + cinema no longer reprompt the AI five times. Pick the variants you need; DOPE re-frames the canonical preview for each aspect via Nano Banana, preserving subject identity and color grade.
- 04
Music sync
Pin scenes to the song.Upload the track. Drop scenes onto the timeline. Storyboards and call sheets render with timecodes. Future: AI beat detection and on-beat cut suggestions. The differentiator versus every generic film management tool — purpose-built for music-driven storytelling.
- 05
Continuity checker
An AI script supervisor.Run a scene-level audit and Claude inspects every shot's first frame plus the atom metadata, flagging breaks: wardrobe changes mid-scene, a hairstyle inversion between cuts, a prop appearing without a story reason, lighting direction shifting. Severity-ranked. Catches issues that delay reshoots.
- 06
3D scout
Walk through the location before you shoot.Upload 30–80 photos of the real location. Behind the scenes the photogrammetry runs (KIRI for splats, mesh photogrammetry alternative). The director navigates the result in-browser, captures any angle, and that capture flows into the shot generation pipeline as the location reference.
- 07
Production-ready outputs
Call sheets, storyboards, AICP budgets.Call sheet PDF per shoot day, with crew, equipment, scenes, times, location plates and notes. Editorial storyboard PDF in DOPE house style — sepia-paper aesthetic, six cells per page, technical metadata baked in. AICP-standard budget with vendor linking, multipliers, CSV export.
- 08
Approvals + comments + activity
Decisions on the record.Comments on any shot, scene, character, location or prop. Reply, resolve, reopen. Approvals badge each entity with who signed off and when (revocations preserve the audit trail). Project activity feed catches every change so the producer who steps away comes back to a readable timeline.
- 09
Production day mode
A click marks a shot wrapped.Once on set, the AD ticks shots through not-shot → shooting → wrapped or skipped. Status with author + timestamp. Pairs with takes-and-notes capture. The day's call sheet is the same DOPE entity, no re-entry.
- 10
Project Brain
A pair-programmer for your film.A persistent chat scoped to your project. Reads your brief, scenes, shots, characters, locations, schedule, budget. Acts on your behalf — patch a scene heading, regenerate a shot's first frame, suggest a schedule, log a creative decision. ⌘B from anywhere. History stays.
- 11
Cross-entity search
⌘K everywhere.Type a fragment. Get matches across scenes, shots, characters, locations, props, crew, shoot days. Keyboard navigates, enter goes. The producer's mental model — "the wide of Maria in the kitchen" — is one query away.
- 12
Department-aware visual workflow
Costumes, makeup, art, camera — each upload knows where it belongs.Every reference image carries a phase (scout, prepro, fitting, makeup test, racord, rehearsal, on set, wrap, post) and a department (production, direction, camera, lighting, sound, art, costume, makeup_hair, vfx, post, continuity, casting). A wardrobe fitting goes in as costume + fitting; a colour test as MU test; a continuity polaroid as racord. Filters and downstream pipelines respect both.
- 13
Equipment with photos
The actual cube from rental, not a generic catalogue.Every equipment item — camera body, lens, skypanel, mic — carries a photo of the unit that came back from the rental house, plus history of every photo before it. The call sheet for the day shows what arrived. The 1st AC sees the same image as the gaffer.
- 14
Voice input on the Brain
Push to talk. The agent listens.Hold the mic in the Brain panel and speak — "move shot 03B to before 03A", "swap Francisca's hair to wet for the second scene", "regenerate the chorus close-up with warmer key". Gemini transcribes. The text lands in the chat for you to review and send. Hands-free ideation while you scout, drive, or look at refs.
- 15
Multi-day call sheets, AICP budget, CSV exports
Output that production swears by.Per-shoot-day call sheet PDF (crew, equipment, scene order, location plates, contact info, call/wrap times, location notes). AICP-standard budget with vendor linking, multipliers, contingency, currency. Print-ready storyboard PDF in DOPE house style. Everything exportable; everything tied back to source-of-truth atoms so an edit upstream propagates.
- 16
Department channels
Slack for the lighting team — but anchored to the project.Every department has its own group channel: camera, lighting, art, costume, makeup, sound, VFX, post, continuity, casting, client. Send messages, drop photos (the actual cube from rental, the wardrobe fitting, a shot from the gel kit), tag teammates. Producer + director read all channels; dept_leads + crew default to their own. Reuses the same comments engine so search and activity are unified.
- 17
Live mode
A wall display the whole crew can stand in front of.Real-time shoot day dashboard: which shot is being shot now (big), counters by status, the day's shotlist with thumbnails and pills, a digest of department channel chatter, the project activity feed. Auto-polls every 10 seconds. Read-only — any project member can stand in front of the iPad and know what's happening. The client doesn't need a phone call to know we wrapped scene 4.
- 18
Image attachments on every comment
Photos in conversation, not in DM purgatory.Every comment thread (entity-scoped or department channel) accepts image and PDF attachments. Costume drops a fitting photo on Francisca's character page. Camera drops a photo of the rental cube in the camera channel. Continuity drops a racord polaroid on shot 03B. All searchable, all part of the project record.
- 19
Department tasks with sign-off
The dept_lead delegates. Only the assignee closes.Inside each department channel, the dept lead (or producer) creates tasks: title, description, priority, due date. Assign to a specific person, the whole department, or leave unassigned for someone to claim. Status flow open → in progress → done (or blocked / cancelled). The sign-off rule is enforced server-side: only the explicit assignee, or any member of the assigned department, can mark a task done. Producers can override when assignees forget.
- 20
Production tasks dashboard
Every department's work in one screen.The producer's mission control: every open task across every department, with status pills, priority badges, overdue flags, urgent flags. Click a row to jump straight to the channel where it lives. Sort blocked-first within each dept, then by priority. Polls live so the dashboard reflects on-set updates without manual refresh. Answers ‘what's stuck where?’ in three seconds.
Departments, not silos
A film set is a federation of departments. Camera, lighting, sound, art, costume, makeup & hair, VFX, continuity. Each sees a different slice of the project; each contributes to the same picture. DOPE encodes that without forcing every team into a single funnel.
Wardrobe fittings
Stylist uploads fitting photos for each cast member, tagged costume + fitting phase. The character's sheet, fittings, MU tests and racord polaroids live on the same card. The director sees Francisca's wardrobe options without leaving casting.
Makeup tests, hair states
HMU dept uploads test looks against the character. The shot generator passes those refs into the prompt: every preview of Francisca renders in the look that was approved, not in the AI's default.
Equipment photos
1st AC photographs the actual rental cube and lenses. Gaffer photographs the skypanels. Sound dept photographs the lavs. Each item carries history, so when the rental house sends a different unit, you have both photos for handoff.
Lighting plans
Choreographer Mode lets the gaffer drop key, fill and practical lights onto the scene's top-down map. Per-shot the angle of incidence reads at a glance — and so does ‘why does shot 02 look different from 01?’
Set decor & props
Set dressing and props each carry their own ref images, vendor links, prop-in-shot mapping. The shot generator injects the prop ref so the kettle in shot 04 is the same kettle in shot 06.
Racord references
On the day, the script supervisor uploads racord photos as phase=racord. The continuity checker pulls those plus the per-shot previews and audits the entire scene for breaks before you wrap.
Talent rates & appearances
Each character carries day rate, agency contact, sheet generation, and an ‘appears in’ matrix that reads scene order × character. The producer sees every actor's schedule at a glance.
Crew, schedule, budget
Crew CRUD with department filters, daily rates, agency linking, clone-crew across projects. Shoot-day calendar with crew & equipment assignment. AICP-standard budget. One project, one source of truth.
Communication, not chat sprawl
Production decisions today live in DMs, email threads, voice notes, and dropped Slack channels. A week before delivery, no one can find the version that was approved. DOPE reverses that: every conversation lives next to the thing it's about.
Comments on every entity
Director and DP debate the framing of shot 03A → the thread is on shot 03A. Producer asks costume about the bass player's outfit → the thread is on Francisca's character page. AD raises a question on the warehouse location → on the location, with @ to the dept lead. Replies, resolve, reopen. Search-friendly because everything is anchored.
Approvals with audit trail
Director signs off on shot 04. Client revokes after a colour-correct test. The pill on the entity shows who approved + when, who revoked + why. Disputes are settled by the record, not by memory.
Activity feed
A chronological log of every meaningful event — comments, approvals, generations, scout uploads, member joins, music timecode pins, continuity checks. The producer who steps away for a meeting comes back to a readable timeline of what changed.
Department-scoped roles
Producer, director, dept lead, crew, client, guest — each with default permissions; dept_leads scope to their departments. Nothing leaks outside the team that should see it; nothing requires permission for the team that needs it.
Department channels
Slack-style group threads scoped per department: camera, lighting, art, costume, makeup, sound, VFX, post, continuity, casting, client. Each thread accepts image + PDF attachments — gaffers post photos of the M40s; costume posts fitting tests; the AC photographs the actual rental cube. Producers + directors see all channels; dept_leads and crew default to their own.
Live mode
A read-only real-time dashboard for the day: current shot with preview, counters by status, day shotlist, digest of department channels, activity. Auto-polls every 10s. The client wants to know if we wrapped scene 4? They open Live. The DP wants to know if costume is ready? They open Live. No more ‘what's happening?’ phone calls.
Brain panel as messenger
The Project Brain sends location plates, character sheets, prop refs into the chat as you ask. Push-to-talk lets you dictate while scouting. Future: proactive nudges (‘Francisca's sheet has no MU test approved 3 days from shoot — flag costume?’) and plan-then-approve flows.
@-mentions (roadmap)
Tag a member in a comment, they get notified. Tag a department, the dept lead picks it up. Tag the Brain, it answers in the same thread with the relevant assets attached.
The Brain — your project teammate
Brain is not a chatbot. It's a Claude-powered teammate that reads your project's state — brief, scenes, shots, atoms, schedule, budget, references — and acts on it via a structured tool surface.
- Reads. Whole brief, every scene, every shot, every character with traits, every location with plate, every prop, decisions log, schedule, budget, comments. Multi-thousand token context window — the Brain has the whole movie in head.
- Writes.Tools to patch a scene heading, regenerate a shot's first frame, suggest a schedule, create a character, log a creative decision, link a prop to shots. Mutations trigger automatic page refresh so the UI reflects the change instantly.
- Listens. Push-to-talk transcription via Gemini for hands-free ideation. Talk while scouting, talk while driving, talk while looking at refs.
- Persists. Conversation history survives drawer close + page reload via per-project localStorage. Pick up the same thread three days later.
- Roadmap.Plan-then-approve flow (Brain proposes a sequence of edits, you click Approve, it executes). Proactive nudges (‘the bass player has no fitting photo approved’). Voice-first agent mode for set use.
Where DOPE sits versus the rest
| StudioBinder / Wrap | Sora / Runway / Midjourney | Frame.io | DOPE | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brief → structured project | manual entry | — | — | AI extraction |
| Photoreal shot previews | — | generic | — | project-coherent |
| Cross-aspect deliverables | — | per-prompt only | — | one-click variants |
| Music sync timeline | — | — | — | built-in |
| Continuity audit | — | — | — | AI script super |
| Call sheets / AICP budget | full | — | — | full |
| Approvals + comments | partial | — | full | full |
| One workspace, one source of truth | — | — | — | yes |
A typical project, end to end
- Day 1 · Intake. Director pastes the brief. AI extracts scenes, characters, locations, props. Fields are editable; ambiguities are surfaced.
- Day 1 · Style Bible. Director sets aspect ratio, camera body, lens, color grade, frame rate, era. Every shot inherits these.
- Day 2 · Casting. Character sheets generated from descriptions or uploaded refs. Identity is locked into every preview.
- Day 2 · Locations. Establishing plates per location, generated or uploaded. 3D scout ingests photo sets for navigation.
- Day 3 · Shots. Per-scene shotlists generated. Director edits action, framing, lens, mood. Choreographer blocking maps (top-down spatial layout) per scene.
- Day 4 · Previews. First-frame and last-frame generation per shot. Continuity check across the scene. Aspect variants for the deliverables.
- Day 5 · Approvals. Director / client signs off on shots. Comments resolved or carried into the next round.
- Pre-shoot. Call sheets per shoot day, with crew, equipment, scene order, location plates, contact info. Storyboard PDF in house style.
- Shoot day.Production status pill on each shot advances on set. Comments capture take notes. Activity feed is the day's shoot log.
- Post handoff. Call sheet PDFs, storyboard PDFs, approved still frames in all delivery aspects, color palette, continuity report — all exportable, all source-of-truth-tied.
What it runs on
- Reasoning — Claude (Anthropic) for brief extraction, atom synthesis, continuity check, prompt enrichment, tool-use. Structured outputs throughout.
- Imagery — Gemini Nano Banana for photoreal shots, last frames, location plates, character sheets, aspect variants, storyboards. Permissive safety on generation (production work).
- 3D — KIRI Engine for Gaussian splats and textured meshes; manual upload path for desktop tools (Polycam, RealityCapture).
- Storage — Postgres (Drizzle ORM), local public/generated for media. Self-host friendly. EU-compatible.
- Web stack — Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind, Radix primitives. No client-side bloat: most rendering happens server-side.
- Auth — Magic-link, no passwords. Workspace + project membership with per-role permissions (producer/director/dept_lead/crew/client/guest).
Pricing direction
Pay-as-you-generate seat plans, BYO API keys for full cost transparency. Final pricing under iteration with launch users — shape below.
- 1 project
- 1 collaborator
- BYO Anthropic + Google API keys
- Watermark on exports
- Unlimited projects
- 5 collaborators
- BYO API keys (no DOPE markup)
- Music sync, continuity, aspect variants
- No watermark · PDF / CSV exports
- Unlimited collaborators
- Multi-workspace · client roles
- SSO + audit log
- Priority support · custom branding
Where this is going
DOPE is the tool we wished existed when we were producing music videos and commercials ourselves. Today: a working pre-production and production-handoff workspace. Next: video generation integrated (Veo, Sora, Kling), voice agent for hands-free ideation, deeper integrations (Frame.io, frameset.app), workflow automation per delivery channel.
Run a project from brief to call sheet in an afternoon.