Everything it takes to make an episode

Script

Write a screenplay, and see how it will be read

Episodes are Fountain screenplays: scene headings, action and dialogue in plain text. The script editor keeps the format for you as Final Draft does, and a moment after you stop, it reads the script the way the director will.

• A reading beside every line. Each action paragraph and line gets a card saying what will be staged, in your show's own words: “Otto walks up to the movie screen · Otto touches the movie screen”.
• Misreadings before you direct. Paragraphs the director will not act on, a sound the show does not have, a heading that names no set: each is flagged on its card and in the gutter.
• Fixed in one click. A misspelled cue offers the cast member it most likely meant (“Use CHIEF”). A sound the show lacks offers the nearest one it has, or makes one from the word. A thing the action handles that the show has no prop for offers “Make a prop called red lantern”, or “Make all 7 missing props” at once.
• New people and places, made on the spot. A speaker the cast lacks gets a button, “OCTAVIUS is new: make a person”, made from what the script says, with no model. It says what it makes before it makes it, the likeliest kind first, from how the script introduces them: “MEI, 11,” is a girl of eleven, “MOCHI, a fat orange cat,” a cat. A place no set answers to gets “Make a set for NIGHT MARKET…”, which lists the places it could be built from, the closest first (a market is a street of shopfronts), with the set's name filled in. Or give the name to someone or somewhere you have.
• Every screenplay form. FADE IN, DISSOLVE TO and FADE OUT are cut as edits, a time card or a SUPER puts words on screen, a MONTAGE is a run of short shots, and an INTERCUT cuts between two places, each side looking toward the other.
• Written as in Final Draft. Enter and Tab move between scene heading, action, character, parenthetical, dialogue and transition, and put in the capitals, the brackets and the blank lines for you. The element you are in is shown, and you can pick another. Names and places complete as you type: after INT. or EXT. the sets and their times of day, then a cue, a prop or a sound, the script's own as well as the show's.
• On the page. The script is set in Courier Prime on industry pages, laid out as its PDF prints, with page and scene numbers, (MORE) and (CONT'D). It shows where each page begins and says which page and scene you are on, the same on every computer and in the browser.
• Find, replace and spelling. Ctrl+F finds and Ctrl+H replaces, by case or by whole word, F3 goes to the next, and Replace all is one undo. Replace Mei with Lin, and MEI's cues read LIN. A wavy line marks a word the dictionary does not know, with suggestions on a right-click. It already knows your cast, sets and props and the script's own names, and works offline.
• Revisions and notes. Lock this draft, and every line changed since is marked with an asterisk in the revision's color: Blue, then Pink, Yellow and Green, on the script and its pages. Select lines and press Ctrl+Alt+M for a note beside them. Notes are answered and resolved, follow their lines as the text changes, and everyone in the show sees them as they are written.
• Direct from the keyboard. Ctrl+S saves, Ctrl+Enter directs, and the episode opens on the timeline where your paragraph plays. A double-click on the timeline brings you back to the words.
• Bring your Final Draft script, take out a PDF. Import script… opens a Final Draft or Fountain file as a new episode, dual dialogue, CONT'Ds and title page included. Export gives the script as an industry-format PDF, with (MORE) and CONT'D where a speech turns the page, a Final Draft file or Fountain, in the app or in the browser.

Director

A director that stages what you wrote

The built-in director reads every action line and turns it into blocking, performance and camera coverage. It needs no model, no key and no network.

• Blocking from the action. Characters walk to marks, to each other and to props, round the furniture and the people in the way. They sit, hide, pick things up and hand them over at the grip. “Mei climbs onto a crate” puts her on top of it until her next move, “Grandpa takes the lantern from Mei” hands it over, and “holds it up” raises it overhead. A shutter is pulled down where it stands. On a theatre stage, players come on and go off through the wings.
• Performance. Over thirty gestures for people, from a shrug to a cheer, and every other body plays them its own way: a cat's cheer wags its tail, a robot's beeps. Arms folded, hands on hips or a pose of your own is held until they gesture with that arm, take something or move. Listeners react while others talk, and fast moves are drawn on ones with speed lines.
• Crowds and passers-by. “Crowds rush past”, “A crowd gathers round the busker”, “Faces turn” and “A cheer from the crowd” each stage a crowd, drawn as your show draws its people, from children to the elderly. After “Mei holds the red lantern up high”, “The crowd slows. Faces turn.” turns every face up to it. A crowd keeps clear of the cast and never steps in front of them. A role the action brings on with “a” (“A STALL OWNER pulls down a shutter”) is acted and voiced, with no cast member to make.
• Props and effects that behave. A teacup comes out of a pocket, a pancake rides its pan, steam is aimed at whoever the line names, and rain falls until its sound stops. Lights change on cue, and the whole set can shake.
• Inserts with words on them. “INSERT - MEI'S PHONE” over “GRANDPA: Come home” fills the frame with the message on the phone's screen, under who it is from. Write a whole conversation, as quoted texts, lines led by who sent them or cues marked (TEXT), and the phone shows it as a messaging app does; write that a phone shows a text, and it does. A note, a screen or a sign shows its words, for as long as they take to read.
• Coverage by film grammar. It holds the axis, keeps eyelines, pans with a walker, frames close inserts the set has no camera for, keeps faces off the edge of the frame, and sees someone climbing up whole. When it mends a shot, the gestures played in it stay in the picture, and a face behind an arch is seen through the opening.
• Or Claude directs, on your plan. Choose Claude as the show's director, and Direct goes to the Claude you already have: Claude Code on your Claude plan, or the Claude connected to the show. reelwright direct does the same from the command line, “on Claude Code on your Claude plan”, with no key and no price.
• A storyboard before any render. Every shot as a card with its own picture, its lines and its action, grouped by scene. Click a card to open the timeline at that shot, and save the whole board as a PDF to hand round.

Timeline

Play the cut, then edit it to the frame

Open an episode on the timeline: shots, camera, dialogue, effects, music, captions, everyone's business and a crowd's on their tracks, with the frame under the playhead beside them and an inspector for whatever you click.

• Live playback. Space plays the episode from the playhead, with its sound. J K L shuttle, and the arrow keys step a frame. While the next frame is drawn, the viewer keeps the last one.
• An inspector for every block. Click a shot, a line, a sound, a caption, a look, a posture, an expression, a gesture or an effect, and the inspector shows everything an edit can change, down to what a cue is timed from. A held pose plays once, for a time or until released. Shift-click to select several.
• Cuts as an editor expects. Drag a cut to roll it, or a shot to slip it. S splits at the playhead, and [ and ] trim to it. Drags land on frames and snap to lines, captions, sounds and the playhead.
• Transitions and camera moves. Choose how a shot comes in: a dissolve, a dip to black, a wipe, an iris or a whip. Give it a camera move, the framing it ends on and its easing, picked from curves drawn beside plain names. The Camera lane draws the curve each move plays.
• Add anything at the playhead. A then a letter adds a sound, music, an effect, a gesture, a face, a look, a posture, a change of clothes, a lighting change, a camera move, a shot, a line or a title card where the playhead stands. Right-click a track or someone's lane for what it can hold, or drag from the library. Each opens in the inspector to adjust.
• Lens and composition. Give a shot its own lens, the camera's height, the air over everyone's heads, and room ahead of where someone looks, or short-side them on purpose. Frame a single over someone else's shoulder.
• Several at once. Select a few blocks and drag one: they all move by as many frames. Each edit is your own, and Ctrl+Z takes it back, a whole drag at a time.
• An editor's tools. Copy, cut and paste shots, lines, sounds and business, even between episodes. Mark In and Out with I and O, then lift the range or extract it so what follows plays sooner. Type a timecode to go there, shuttle with J K L, and step from cut to cut.
• Sound you can see and mix. Every sound draws its waveform, meters run as it plays, and each track has mute and solo. Fade any clip in or out from handles at its corners, and level the tracks in a mixer panel that folds away like the others.
• Markers. M marks the playhead. Name a marker, drag it, and jump between them; it stays on the word it marks when the line moves.
• Captions, proposals and round trips. Lines are cut into caption cards timed for reading. A showrunner's proposal is drawn as a ghost until you approve it. From the command line, the cut goes out as OpenTimelineIO and your editor's trims come back as edits.

Previs

Block and shoot the episode in 3D

Open the 3D view over the timeline (Shift+V), and the episode stands in front of you at the playhead: the cast posed where the cut has them, the props, the lighting and the effects. It scrubs and plays with the timeline, in the installed Studio and in a browser.

• Look through the shot. The view is the shot's own frame, exactly as the timeline shows it. Drag to pan and tilt, dolly with the wheel, change the lens, or fly the camera with the right button and W A S D.
• Keep the view you found. U uses this view for this shot: the shot gets a new camera setup where you stand, as one change. Play it again, and the shot is the view you saw, to the pixel.
• Step out to a free camera. Esc lets you orbit and fly round the set, with the shot's camera drawn where it stands.
• Block it by hand. Drag anyone onto a mark, beside a piece of the set, or onto open floor, which gets a new mark. They walk there from the playhead. A move that cannot be made says why.
• Move the camera through a shot. Put camera keys on the timeline's camera strip, each framing whom it likes at its own size, height and lens, and the camera pans, pushes in or zooms between them as the change asks, eased as you say. Two keys make a dolly zoom.
• Focus like a lens. Any shot can hold focus on someone's eyes wherever they go, or at a distance, at an aperture; a key that focuses elsewhere racks the focus, and what is off it blurs as that lens would. A shot can be handheld, or locked off in a style that shakes.
• Proposals in place. A showrunner's change to the episode is drawn as a ghost, where it would put everyone and the camera, to accept or reject. Viewers look, play and pilot, and change nothing.

Cast

Characters of any kind, made from your words

A character can be a person, an animal, a creature, a robot or a talking teapot. Describe it in a sentence, and Reelwright makes it, with no model and no key.

• Any kind of body. A person, a four-legged animal, a snake, slug or worm, a blob or a ghost, a robot on wheels, treads, a hover pad or legs, or a talking object: a kettle, a teapot, a lamp, a toaster, a crate or a book.
• From a sentence. New character opens on “describe it in your words”. From “a grumpy three-eyed space slug who runs the cargo bay”, Reelwright reads what it is, its shape and features, its size and colors, its manner and a voice to match. Or ask for a few to pick from.
• At their age, as the script has them. Make everyone a script names in one click, looking like the script says and drawn at their age: “MEI, 11,” has a child's bigger head and shorter legs, and “GRANDPA HUO, 70s,” grey or white hair, bushy brows and a stoop. Grandpa is “he” though the script never says so. The Age row in Cast › Fields draws anyone again at another age, keeping their face.
• Life under the sea. A hermit crab private eye, an octopus bandleader, a whale torch singer: fish, sharks, whales, dolphins, seahorses and sea turtles, octopuses, squid and jellyfish, crabs and lobsters, each drawn and rigged as its kind, swimming or scuttling sideways, with flippers, tentacles and claws that wave, conduct and hold props.
• They act like themselves. Each kind moves its own way and at its own pace: on paws, in a slither, a roll, a hover, an ooze or a hop. A wave written for a person is a paw for a cat and a beep for an armless robot, and every mouth lip-syncs. The director reads “rolls”, “trundles”, “oozes”, “prowls” and “powers down”, and calls a creature what it is (“the robot”) when there is only one.
• Pose your own gestures. In the character studio's Poses, New gesture… puts a handle on each hand and foot, the head, the chest and the hips. Drag a hand and the arm reaches for it, lower the hips and the knees bend with the feet on the floor, never past what a joint can do. Key it on a strip, give the fingers a grip (a point, a fist, a thumb up), and it plays like the built-in ones: on the timeline, by name in a script and in renders.
• Walks of their own. Give anyone a walk of their own (a swagger, a stomp, a tiptoe) at their own pace.
• The character studio. Open anyone on a turntable, on the model sheet's paper. Turn them to the sheet's five angles, lay the approved sheet over them to see what has moved, and try their expressions, mouth shapes, postures, gestures, walks, costumes, palettes and props, live. Variations… offers four to choose from.
• Casts from a pattern. A character pattern describes a kind of character, and each draw from it is distinct: its own silhouette, colors, height and hair, with a model sheet of turnarounds, expressions, mouth shapes and palette.
• A wardrobe, not one costume. Give anyone other outfits beside their own clothes: the raincoat, the pajamas, the disguise. Make one from what they wear in Cast › Wardrobe and change it layer by layer. On the timeline they change into it at the playhead, and it holds from scene to scene until they change again.
• Faces in the cast list. Every character has a thumbnail of their face beside their name, drawn once and redrawn only when they or the look change.
• Lock what is canon. Lock a character, or one detail of it, and nothing changes it without your say.

Sets

Build your sets in 3D, from a library or by hand

Open a set, and it stands in front of you in 3D, in your show's style. Walk round it, look through its cameras and change anything in it by hand. Every change is listed in History, and Ctrl+Z takes it back.

• Walk round it. Orbit, pan and fly as in a pro 3D tool. Keys 1 to 9 look through the set's camera setups, framed exactly as they shoot. Overlays show the marks, walkways, entrances, cameras and lights, and Cast on marks stands everyone in their places.
• Move anything. Drag a mark, a piece, a camera or a walkway across the floor, turn it by its knob, raise it by its arrow, or aim a camera by what it looks at. Moves land on a 5 cm grid and turns on 15° steps, or type the number. Save view as setup puts a new camera where you stand.
• A library of places. Thirteen kits of about two hundred pieces that take any style, from a 1940s jazz club and a 1950s diner to a coral reef, a castle and a moon base, and twenty lighting looks. Twelve whole places build from a few words, with their marks, cameras and lighting: “a 1940s jazz club” comes out as one. New set lists them beside your show's own, and a place the library does not know by name, a ROOFTOP or a NIGHT MARKET, is built from the place you pick, the nearest listed first.
• Add a piece. The library drawer shows every piece in your show's style, searchable by words and by shelf. Drag one in, and it stands where it belongs: on the floor, on a wall, from the ceiling or on the table under it.
• Make one, or bring one in. The piece maker builds a piece from simple shapes, with its sizes, colors from your palette, seats and rules for where it goes. Bring in a glTF, GLB or OBJ model, or a PNG or JPEG as a standing cut-out, a decal, a painted flat or a 360° backdrop, and it is drawn in your show's style.
• Light it. Start from a look, turn the hour of the day, set the key, fill and rim, add fog or light rippling as under water, and light the lamps or the neon.
• Light that carries a mood. A lighting change fades over seconds or dims to a level, timed on the timeline. Haze, shafts of light, blinds and gobos, and a real sky with the sun and moon at their hour. The library's looks include moonlight through the blinds, a misty morning and a storm.

Showrunner Optional

Bring in Claude as your showrunner

Connect the Claude you already have, with no API key, and a showrunner that knows your show joins you. It works with the same tools you do, and nothing it suggests is written until you approve it. Settings › Claude (Ctrl+,) says at its top how Claude is connected, and Studio's chat and rail say when it is working on the show.

• Your own Claude, no key. Add Reelwright to claude.ai or the Claude app as a connector (Studio fills in the address), or to the Claude Code on your computer. Ask it to direct an episode, write, keep the show's memory or find a look, and it does it on your own plan. What it does shows in Studio's chat as it does it, and its proposals wait there for you.
• The chat is your Claude's. With claude.ai or Claude Code connected, Studio's chat leads with it: the things to ask go to your Claude, the line under the box says where Enter sends your ask, and the header says “Claude is connected through claude.ai · working on the show now” while it works. To start it there, type /mcp__reelwright__here and what you want in Claude Code, or press + in claude.ai and find Reelwright under Connectors: it gets the show's next steps and where you are in Studio.
• Approve where you asked. In claude.ai and Claude Desktop, a change Claude proposes shows as Reelwright's card right in the chat: what it changes, field by field and why, and for an episode the changed shots' stills, before and after. Approve, Reject or Open in Studio there, without switching to Studio, and with several options pick one and reject the rest. The card follows the chat's language and its light or dark theme.
• Ask in Claude Code from Studio. On the desktop, once Reelwright is added in Claude Code, what you ask your own Claude in Studio's chat opens Claude Code in your show with it typed in: press Enter there to send it.
• Studio's chat on your plan. On the desktop, with Claude Code signed in with your Claude plan, Studio's own chat runs on it. Reelwright never sees your Claude sign-in.
• A key, if you prefer one. An Anthropic API key is an option, on the desktop or the web. It is checked with Anthropic before it is kept, shown by its last four characters, and on the web kept encrypted for your account only. You pay Anthropic as you go, and an admin can set each person a monthly cap.
• Proposals, not surprises. Every change arrives with a field-by-field diff and previews: a model sheet, a set's views, a storyboard. Approve, reject, lock or undo. Every approval is a commit in the show's git history.
• It sees what you see. Each message carries what you have open: the script lines you selected, the shot at the playhead, or the character in front of you.
• Costs in plain sight. On a key, the chat shows what each turn cost, and the show's budgets per request, per episode and per month stop it before it overspends.

Claude is optional. Everything else on this page works without it.

Reelwright Runner

Let your own computer do the heavy work

Use Studio in a browser from anywhere, and let a computer of yours render, voice and draw the previews. It connects to Reelwright outward, nothing is opened on it, and it runs only your work.

• Pair a computer. Your computers, in either edition, gives you a code for the runner on your machine. In the installed Studio, signed in, it is one switch: “Let this computer run my Reelwright work”.
• Choose where work runs. On Reelwright, on “my computer when it's on, else Reelwright”, or “always my computer”, for all your shows or just one. Episodes says where each render is running.
• Renders and previews on your GPU. A render sent to your computer runs there on its GPU, and only the files the other side lacks move. A dropped connection picks up where it left off. Model sheets, set views, stills and storyboards are drawn there too.
• A farm of your own. With several of your computers on, a render is shared out between them, and the lead machine puts the episode together.
• Your plan, your disk. With Claude Code signed in there and your chat on your plan, the model director and memory run on your Claude plan too. A runner can also offer the shows on its own disk to the web Studio.
• Only what you allow. Jobs are signed by Reelwright and checked by the runner, which writes only in its own folder. A shared show's work goes to an editor's computer only if its owner allows it. Revoke a computer at any time.