Reference H · Credits and licences
Reference
Whose words this book quotes, where its borrowed examples come from, under what licence, which makers' documentation it was built from, and the fonts it is set in.
H.1 How quoted material is used
Every example in this book carries a label that says where it comes from. 72 of the 90 examples are labelled Written for this book: they were written for it, have not been run, and need no credit. The other 18 are someone else's text or the author's own trailer prompts, and H.2 credits each of them by number.
A Research exemplar is a text found in the research the book was built on, copied unchanged; where its label says excerpt, only part of a longer text is quoted. A Maker's example is a prompt printed by a tool's maker, quoted exactly as published, with the date it was read. From Mastorna, corrected is the author's own prompt for the Mastorna trailer, brought to the standard this book teaches: the corrections are this book's and the rest is the author's. None of these was run for this book in the form printed.
Makers' documentation (Google, OpenAI, ByteDance and the others in H.5) is quoted in bounded excerpts, with the date it was read. The commentary around every quotation is this book's own and is not endorsed by its authors. Where a quoted text is published under an open licence, H.3 says so and prints the notice the licence asks for.
H.2 Credits for the examples
The tables below list, by number, every example labelled as a research exemplar, a maker's example or from Mastorna, and no other.
Research exemplars (nine). They come from the research library the book was built on. The July 2026 guides were written by two research streams, one by ChatGPT and one by Claude; the September 2026 creator research was prepared for the author and is dated 27 Sep 2026. Each text is copied unchanged.
Example | What it is | Credit |
4.1 | one decision, on two rails | The treatment-craft research in the research library; the file does not mark its author. Both paragraphs are copied unchanged from it. |
8.2 | the packet that opens every paid batch | The July 2026 research guide written by ChatGPT (the cinematic-generation guide). Copied unchanged; the two "Why it works" bullets are this book's. |
9.2 | a handover, before contact | The September 2026 creator research (27 Sep 2026), prepared for the author. Copied unchanged. |
10.1 | a master face that mints the clause | The July 2026 research guide written by Claude (the master guide): 118 words of a 411-word prompt, copied unchanged. |
10.2 | a straight-on world-text reference | The July 2026 research guide written by ChatGPT (the cinematic-generation guide). Copied unchanged; the guide marks it as instructional and its strings as fixtures. |
30.1 | comparing a finishing candidate | The September 2026 creator research (27 Sep 2026), prepared for the author. Copied unchanged. |
30.2 | 16:9 to 9:16, protecting the bottle and the hand | The July 2026 research guide written by ChatGPT (the cinematic-generation guide). Copied unchanged. |
31.1 | a delivery rejected and rebuilt | The July 2026 research guide written by ChatGPT (the cinematic-generation guide). Copied unchanged; the three "Why it works" bullets are this book's. |
33.4 | a generation job brief | The September 2026 creator research (27 Sep 2026), prepared for the author. Copied unchanged. |
Maker's example (one).
Example | What it is | Credit |
17.1 | a clay clip as the only reference for the camera and the blocking | ByteDance, the Seedance 2.5 prompt guide on BytePlus ModelArk, the 3D clay-model reference example, read 30 Sep 2026. Quoted unchanged, in one bounded excerpt, with credit; no open licence is claimed for it. |
From Mastorna, corrected (eight). The Mastorna trailer is the author's own work: a trailer for Il viaggio di G. Mastorna, the film Federico Fellini planned and never made. Its prompts are the author's, and each was corrected for this book.
Example | What it is | Which part of the trailer |
9.1 | the establishing frame: where a record's promises enter the prompt | Trailer shot 1.1, the establishing frame (five passages). |
11.5 | the establishing frame of a 1966 trailer, in corrected form | Trailer shot 1.1, the establishing frame, whole. |
16.1 | the crane down into the piazza | Trailer shot 2.1, the crane down into the piazza. |
22.1 | four clipped words, in partial profile | Trailer shot 4.3, the hotel desk. |
26.5 | the theme introduced plainly, with an ending and room for speech | The opening cue of the trailer. |
35.1 | an impossible train built from iron, rivets and smoke | Trailer shot 6.1, the four-decker train, still. |
35.2 | a crane rises while the train slides away | Trailer shot 6.1, the four-decker train, motion. |
35.3 | the plate for the climax, timed to its take | Trailer shot 10.3, the outcry, the plate for Sync Lipsync 3. |
H.3 Licence notices
Very little of the quoted material sits under an open licence. Three sources do, and each is credited here.
MIT licence: Reviral, the Kling prompt collection. Two short phrases are quoted in Chapter 14: from a snowboarder's prompt, in which the camera waits and then follows, "begins as a long-lens locked shot, then pans right to follow only after the carve" (14.9), and from a mountain biker's prompt, "one coherent fan of dust that lingers behind" (14.12). The collection publishes neither settings nor a result for them, and the book quotes them as wording only. The licence asks that its notice travel with a copy, so the notice follows, as its authors published it.
MIT License
Copyright (c) 2026 Reviral — https://reviral.ai
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.MIT licence: Stability AI, the Stable Audio 3 repository. One phrase from the repository's prompting guide is quoted in Chapter 28 (28.3): its models "don't output intelligible vocals". The repository's licence is the MIT licence, with the same permission text as above and the copyright line Copyright (c) 2026 Stability AI.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0): Google, the Gemini API documentation. The foot of each page says: "Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License." Short excerpts of two pages are quoted unchanged, with ellipses where words are left out. From the music-generation page (Lyria): results "may vary between calls, even with the same prompt", and the instruction "Instrumental only, no vocals." (Chapters 25 and 28). From the image-generation page: the semantic negative ("an empty, deserted street"), the staged build ("First, create a background …") and the description of the Pro model, "designed for professional asset production and complex instructions" (Chapters 2, 9 and 11). The commentary around them is this book's and is not endorsed by Google.
Everything else is quoted as a bounded excerpt with the date it was read and its maker named, and is not claimed to be under any open licence. That includes Google's other pages (the prompting guides for Nano Banana Pro, the Veo guide and the Generative AI Prohibited Use Policy) and every other maker in H.5.
H.4 People and bodies named in the craft chapters
The craft chapters draw on the research library, which reports what practitioners and professional bodies have said. Where a chapter names a person or a body as the source of an idea, the name is in the sentence. They are, by chapter:
Chapter 3: Sir John Hegarty; the agencies Wieden+Kennedy (its "Case for Chaos"), BBH and FCB.
Chapter 4: Hoyte van Hoytema (an interview for the Motion Picture Association), Bradford Young (an article in American Cinematographer), Jill Bogdanowicz (on the colourist's role) and Emmanuel Lubezki (a caption example).
Chapters 5 and 6: Rina Yang, Bradford Young, Stuart Bentley, Justin Brown and Greig Fraser, on the work named in those chapters.
Chapter 7: the production designer Melanie Allen, Dante Ferretti, the Property Masters Guild, the Academy's guide to costume design, D&AD, Stephen Shore and Michael Frye.
Films and commercials named in the craft chapters belong to their makers and are named only to point at a decision; none is reproduced. Names are given as their authors publish them.
H.5 Makers' documentation the book draws on
The facts marked "the maker documents" come from these makers' own pages, read on the dates given in the text. Names only; the details are kept in the author's research archive.
Google: the Gemini API documentation (image generation and music generation), the prompting guides for Nano Banana Pro, the Veo guide, the Lyria documentation and the Generative AI Prohibited Use Policy.
OpenAI: the image-prompting guide, the image-generation guide, the GPT Image 2.5 model pages and the usage policies.
ByteDance: the Seedance 2.5 prompt guide and tutorial on BytePlus ModelArk, and Dreamina.
Kuaishou: the Kling VIDEO 3.0 guides and the announcement of Kling 4.0 of 28 Sep 2026.
Alibaba Cloud: the Model Studio reference and service terms for Wan.
sync.so: the model and lip-sync pages for Sync Lipsync 3.
ElevenLabs: the service reference, help centre, model and music terms, and prohibited use policy.
Suno: the help pages, the model page and the terms.
MiniMax: the platform documentation.
Adobe: Premiere Pro help; Firefly help and FAQ.
Apple: Final Cut Pro and its XML formats. OpenTimelineIO: the OTIO format.
Stability AI: the Stable Audio 3 repository and prompting guide.
Higgsfield: the model catalogue and contracts, the tool descriptions, the help pages and the terms of use.
Topaz: Topaz Video and its panel for Premiere Pro.
Makers of the other video tools in Chapter 20, one entry each from their own pages, dated in the chapter: Runway, Luma, LTX, Black Forest Labs (FLUX 3 Video), xAI (Grok Imagine) and Google (Gemini Omni Flash).
Standards and film stock: the EBU (R 128), ATSC (A/85), the ITU (BS.1770); Kodak (Vision3 250D) and CineStill.
This reference records credit and licence; it is not legal advice. Chapter 34 covers the rights and terms of the tools themselves.
H.6 Fonts
The book is set in four typefaces, each published under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1, and used as distributed by Fontsource.
Typeface | Used for | Copyright line |
Source Serif 4 | body text | © 2014 - 2021 Adobe Systems Incorporated, with Reserved Font Name "Source" |
Source Sans 3 | headings, tables and boxes | © 2023 Adobe, with Reserved Font Name "Source" |
Noto Naskh Arabic | Arabic text | Copyright 2022 The Noto Project Authors |
JetBrains Mono | code and prompts | Copyright 2020 The JetBrains Mono Project Authors |
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