The storyboard card

The agent's editorial plan — thesis, target length, beats — shown as a card you can read, steer, and hold it to. It persists across reloads.

The storyboard is how you see what the agent is about to do — and steer it — without reading a single tool call. Before its first cut on any full edit, the agent commits to an editorial plan and shows it to you as a card above the chat. Instead of discovering the agent's intent after 20 edits, you see the whole argument of the video up front and can redirect it in one sentence.

What the card shows

Thesis — the one idea the video argues, in a single line (e.g. "Founder's pivot story as a fast-paced reel").
Target length and format — e.g. "30s · tiktok-reel".
Beats — 3–6 ordered beats, each with a purpose tag (hook, context, payoff, cta), a one-line summary, and the source-footage range it comes from (e.g. "42.0–46.0s").
Progress — each beat is planned or done; the header shows a running count like "2/4 beats done", and finished beats get a checkmark.

The card is collapsible — click the header to expand or fold the beat list.

Why it matters

The storyboard isn't decoration — it's the shared contract between you and the agent. The same storyboard you see is echoed back to the agent with every message, and the agent judges the finished edit against it: every beat represented on the timeline, and nothing on the timeline that serves no beat. If the cut and the card disagree, the agent treats that as a bug to fix.

It also persists per scene, across turns and reloads. Close the tab, come back tomorrow, and the plan is still there — the agent picks up mid-edit exactly where the beats say it left off. Each scene in a multi-scene project has its own storyboard (see Scenes).

Steering the storyboard

Redirect the agent in plain language — it updates the storyboard first, then re-edits to match. Copy-paste starters:

Change the thesis to focus on the pricing announcement, not the demo.

Add a beat for the customer quote at around 2:10, right before the CTA.

Make it 45 seconds instead — drop the context beat if you have to.

Swap the order: open on the payoff, then explain.

The hook beat is weak — find a stronger line in the first minute and update the plan.

What the agent actually does

The agent writes the plan with the set_storyboard tool: thesis, target seconds, optional format, and the beat list with source ranges. Calls are full-replace — every update resends the whole storyboard, which is how beats flip from planned to done as the agent completes them. The plan is stored per scene in your browser (IndexedDB), rendered as the card, and included in every project snapshot the agent reads.

When to do it manually

There's no manual storyboard editor — the card is written and updated by the agent. If you'd rather plan by hand, sketch your beats in a message ("open on X, then Y, end on the CTA, 40 seconds total") and the agent will adopt them as its storyboard before cutting.

Limits

Guardrails: at most 12 beats (the agent normally uses 3–6), thesis capped at 280 characters, target length between 5 seconds and 10 minutes.
Beats marked "done" reflect the agent's progress, not an independent check — the quality checks are what actually validate the result.
The storyboard is a plan, not an edit: changing it does nothing to the timeline until the agent acts on it.
It's stored in your browser, so opening the project on another device starts without the card until the agent writes it again.