The Master Guide / 00 Start here
Who it is for, and how to read it
The Guide is written for a professional director doing the work, and it speaks to you directly.
The Guide is written for a professional director doing the work, and it speaks to you directly.
Who it is for
Directors, creative directors and producers who know film craft and want award-level work from one lean set of AI tools: Nano Banana Pro (photoreal), Seedream 5.0 Pro (stylised) and GPT Image (cut-outs and graphics) for stills, Seedance 2.5 for video, ElevenLabs v4 for voice, Sync-3 for lip sync and Suno for music. Higgsfield carries the image, video and lip-sync models; voice runs on your own ElevenLabs account and music in Suno (see Tools at a glance → Each job, its tool, its label and its chapter). Arabic gets real depth throughout.
Where the Guide says "you", it means the director. If a team makes the takes, the same checks apply to them, and the decisions stay yours.
How it is organised
Nineteen chapters, in the order a film is made. Each chapter is split into sections, shown in the sidebar, and every topic is one page. A chapter's first page lists its sections and topics.
Chapters | What they hold |
00 Start here · 01 How a production runs | How to use the Guide; the whole job: its eight stages, the client's documents and the quality bar |
02 The brief and research · 03 Concepts and references · 04 The treatment and presentations · 05 Planning, budgets and takes | Everything decided before the first anchor is made: the brief, the idea, the treatment, the client pages, the shot plan and its budget |
06 Anchors and stills | Every still: the still-prompt structure, storyboard frames and diagrams, then the photoreal and stylised anchors |
07 Video with Seedance · 08 Cinematography · 09 Performance · 10 Voice and lip sync | The moving, speaking film |
11 Editing · 12 Music · 13 Sound design and mix | The cut, then the music and the sound written against it |
14 Finishing and delivery | The grade, graphics, captions, versions and the delivered files |
15 Genres · 16 Tools at a glance · 17 Glossary · 18 Sources and changelog | Reference |
How a page reads
Each topic is one page, opening with a one- or two-sentence summary. The method comes first; the tool steps sit in one "Do it yourself" block at the end.
One home per subject. A subject is taught once. Elsewhere it gets a pointer in italics: the chapter or section, an arrow, then the topic, which links to that page.
Every term of art is explained at first use, and again in the Glossary.
Every prompt and example is written for this guide. Every brand and person in them is invented, so there is nothing to look up; prompts sit in a box you can copy. Arabic lines are set in «…», never on the same line as English.
A short "Sources" list ends each topic; the main ones are in Sources and changelog → The main sources.
The labels
Every method carries a quiet tag saying how strong its evidence is.
Label | What it means |
[proven] | Two or more respected creators, or established human craft practice, show it in released work. |
[single strong source] | One strong creator or studio shows it. It enters only as a labelled option, never as a default. |
[official guidance] | The tool's maker or Higgsfield documents it; no creator production yet. |
[best available, not yet validated] | No creator proof yet; used because nothing better exists. Measurements from normal work may firm it up later. |
(decided) | A house rule, settled for how these films are made. It carries no evidence label because it is a decision, not a finding. A single-source method kept as a default carries "(decided)" instead of its label. |
Option: use it when … | A method used only when its trigger holds, written straight after "when". Its evidence label follows. |
How to read them together:
A list carries a label on each item, not one label over the whole list.
Platform facts (settings, limits, prices) carry no label; they are dated, and you check them before you spend.
A tool or a default needs several independent sources; a creator family counts once, and course sellers, affiliates and vendor case studies don't count (see Tools at a glance → The lean-stack rule and the evidence rule).
Some options say "use it when the plan names it". That means you decide per film, in the plan (your shot plan, made after the treatment is approved), and the topic says what favours it.
Labels are for your working pages. They never appear on a page the client sees (see The stages and gates → What the client sees, and what stays internal).
The principles
Four principles hold everywhere (decided). Learn from what others have proven; the only measurements are free ones from takes made anyway. One tool per job. A fix from one past project is not a universal rule. The bar is award-level human-made work, never AI-made work (see References → What counts).