Read before you shoot.
What previs is and what it settles, the named moves of the craft, the words the work uses, and the arguments behind the product — written to be worth reading whether or not you ever open a studio.
Pre-production is where a film is decided and where most of its money is committed, and almost none of it is written down for the people who are new to it. A producer meets the word animatic on a call and does not ask. A brand team is shown a storyboard and assumes the shot has been designed. A director says Rembrandt and the room nods. The pages here are an attempt to write the craft down plainly: what the planning documents are and what each one actually promises, what the named camera and lighting moves do to a frame, what the vocabulary means, and what we have learned building a platform that makes those decisions earlier and holds them. Each page ends in the studio that does the thing, but none of them needs the studio to be useful.
What previs is
Storyboard, animatic, previs and techvis are four different promises about a shoot. What each one settles, what changes when a decision is made at the planning stage rather than on the day, and how the six studios map onto that work.
Open →LibraryThe technique library
The named moves a director asks for — a Dutch angle, a Rembrandt key, a dolly zoom, a bleach bypass — each explained in a few lines, with the control it moves in PREVIZ, the studio that performs it, what it contradicts and what sits beside it.
Open →ReferenceThe glossary
The platform's own terms and the industry's around them, one line each, written the way the word is actually used here. The terms with a home in the product have a page that says where that is.
Open →PapersResearch · 19 papers
The arguments behind the product, written out: why a clip is not a film, why continuity has to be locked rather than hoped for, why a scene should be staged before it is rendered, and how engines are orchestrated behind one policy.
Open →DispatchFounder notes
Every two weeks: what shipped, who did it, what was learned on live client work, and where this is heading. Sent by email and published here, with a feed.
Open →LogThe changelog
Every feature, fix and refinement, dated and attributed to the studio it shipped in, from the first commit. Built in public, shipping every week, with a feed of the newest fifty entries.
Open →