A user makes 154 outputs for one shot. A week later someone else opens the one they kept and asks how it was made. Right now the only way to find out is to ask them, and if they are not around the next person spends a day retrying what the original user already knows does not work.
Everything recorded about one single output: what went in, which model ran it, and what it came from.
[VISUAL STYLE]
Medium: live action | photograph | high
Color Grade ("Petrol Halo Bloom"): black at 2, petrol-teal shadows | midtones low, S-curve, ochre skinless metal | roll-off to cream and sodium amber | saturation restrained, teal-versus-amber split extreme
Skin: Photorealistic skin with natural texture, visible pores, and true tonal variation.
Film Stock: film | unnamed push-processed color negative (low) | coarse grain, heavy in shadows, chroma-speckled | halation, bloom, edge chroma bleed
Lens: unnamed spherical (low) | 90mm | wide aperture, shallow plane, smeared oval highlights | soft overall, heavy diffusion, veiling glow, long fall-off
Lighting: single hard raking key, low left, specular | hard, shadow edge dissolving into haze | 12:1, no fill, shadows crushed to black | fall-off immediate, background unlit
[REFERENCE PROTOCOL]
Image 1 is the STYLE reference: take film character, lens rendering, colour grading, and the QUALITY of its light (how hard or soft it is, its contrast ratio, direction and fall-off) from it, and nothing else. Do not copy its subject, composition, location, any object in it, or its time of day and weather. Compose a wholly new scene per [SHOT].
Image 2 is the CHARACTER reference, walker 2: slender east asian woman, subtle freckles across her cheeks and nose, long thick wavy dark hair. The person in the photograph is this exact person. Match their face, hair, skin and build precisely. Take NOTHING else from it, not their clothing, not their pose, not the studio backdrop they stand on. Wardrobe, pose and setting come from [SHOT].
[FACES]
Faces come from the character reference images and from nowhere else. Take no face, likeness or person from image 1, whether or not people appear in it. Any additional person the shot names is a NEW INVENTED INDIVIDUAL with an invented face, never a face taken or adapted from image 1.
[SHOT]
Two women walk past each other in opposite directions through abutting dimensions; one woman walks through an airport concourse: a low moving-walkway rail, a row of black bench seating, an abandoned luggage cart, and the base of a column carrying a departures board. The right half is open field: dry grass lying in windblown rows, a bare dirt path worn through it, scattered white wildflowers, and one leaning wire fence post. At the seam between the two dimension ground planes, the concourse floor meets the soil, the two women are level with each other at the center of the frame, roughly two arm-lengths apart across the seam.
The camera is high angle, 3/4 orthogonal pointing down at them; both ground planes read parallel and surfaces converge
[EXPRESSION]
Derive each person's expression from what they are doing and where they are, as described in [SHOT]: let the action and situation set the face, as an unposed documentary frame would catch it. When several people appear, each reacts to their own part of the scene rather than to the camera. Avoid BOTH failure modes: posed camera-aware smiling, and uniformly blank expressionless faces.
[STRICT NEGATIVE PROMPTS]
No text, glyphs, lettering, writing, numbers, typography, captions, subtitles, watermarks, logos, or borders anywhere in the image. Any signs, screens, labels, posters, or packaging that appear in the scene must be BLANK or fully illegible; never render readable characters in any language. No plastic, waxy, airbrushed, or beauty-filtered skin. No posed or camera-aware smiling. No extra people beyond those the shot names. No duplicated, merged, or deformed faces, hands, or limbs. No CGI, illustration, or plastic render look. No studio backdrop unless the shot names one. No added props beyond the shot description.
Render the shot in exactly the visual style described. Film stock character, lens rendering and colour grade stay constant. Lighting SPLITS: its quality, meaning how hard or soft it is and its contrast ratio, direction and fall-off, carries over from the Lighting line above; its condition follows the shot's stated time and weather. Where the Lighting line names a time of day, weather or light source that [SHOT] contradicts, [SHOT] decides the condition and only the quality carries over, rendered within the stated grade. If the shot names no camera position, use a tripod-height frontal or profile stance with the subject mid-frame. Full-bleed photograph.Compare the differences between the inputs of two or more outputs.
| this output | e12063e3260e187e |
| this try | 20260806T062146Z_midjourney-v8 |
| these inputs | c7f1e92c7737ff91 |
| this output | e4ed77d2c16dd4e1 |
| this try | 20260806T062349Z_midjourney-v8 |
| these inputs | c9e21e5c3b4b5af7 |
The view shows generation rounds over time, with groups defined as packages built from alike inputs: the same reference pictures or the same prompt wording.
The view shows generations over time, grouped by the similarity of their inputs (text and images).
All 154 outputs of a single shot, from 16 packages, made in about half an hour. An entire session reads at a glance. The user can drill down into any individual output or switch views to track prompts over time.
Recent sessions as cards, leaving the choice of where to go. Or straight back into the last session. I guessed the second one, because the work tends to sit on one thing for hours.
Right now it guesses by looking for gaps of more than two minutes, and it admits it is guessing. The other way is a “new round” button pressed before starting. One extra click buys a fact.
It is the only thing here nobody else has, which argues for building it first. It is also the one that can confidently show a pattern that is not real, which argues for building it last, once the record underneath is solid.
This page is packed on purpose, so a whole shot reads at once. The trade is that every output is small. Six big outputs instead of sixty small ones is a different tool, and now is the time to decide.
The tool opens and closes, so it records this for free without asking anyone. Everything on this page happened in one 31-minute session. A session holds whatever you did in it, however many things that was.
Packages built from alike inputs, gathered by the dial whether they ran ten minutes or ten days apart. Nothing to file: a session is what you worked in, a shot is what the work turns out to be about.
One submission, kept together: what went in and what came back. One package in this shot billed 4 calls, returned 16 images and cost $0.32.
The text written, and any images or video handed to the model alongside it, plus which model and which settings. Change any one of those and they are different inputs.
A single image or clip. This shot has 154 of them. The page treats image and video the same way, because the trail behind them is the same trail.
One call to the model returns a group. The package on this page made 4 calls and got 16 images back: 4 generations of 4, not one batch of 16.
One of the inputs: a style to copy, a character who has to stay the same, a colour palette. Order matters to some models.
For any output: which words made it, which references went in, which model, who made it, when. When the trail is broken the page says so instead of guessing.
A user sees an output they like and carries on from there. The tool remembers where they started, so the path back never gets lost.