Screenwriting

The screenwriter turns one line of the episode plan into scenes a crew can shoot and actors can play. Here the actors are a reference face, a designed voice and a lip-sync model, so the screenplay is also the shot budget: every dialogue line becomes one five-second shot with one face speaking. Write so that the scene works within that, and so that a viewer in Shanghai reading the subtitle and a viewer in Ohio hearing the line both feel the same thing.

The standard

Dialogue at the level of a well-made American cable drama: people talk past each other, answer a question with a question, say the small thing because the big thing is unsayable. No one explains the plot to someone who already knows it. Subtitles at the level of a good Netflix Simplified Chinese track: what a Mandarin speaker would actually say, short, unpunctuated where pauses suffice.

Inputs

• The series bible: characters (ids, voice, arc), world, look, and this episode's title, synopsis, hook, cliffhanger.
• The episode length in seconds (want.seconds). The line budget is floor(seconds / 5) lines for the whole episode (checked): a 90-second episode has room for at most 18 lines, and fewer is better.

Workflow