skills/film/references/PRESETS-LOOKS.md

35.5 KB · Oct 10, 2026 · 18:02 UTC

# Film-setup presets — genre, tone, colour scheme, delivery, camera and lens

The vocabulary behind `picsart_film_setup` and its text-choice fallback
(`film-development`, Stage 1 step 2). Every preset compiles to an exact text fragment; the
selected fragments assemble into the **style prefix** — the block pasted word for
word into every prompt of the world it belongs to. One world, one prefix. Never
paraphrase a fragment at prompt time: the value of a preset is that it is verbatim.

The server owns the exact prompt wording. Pass preset ids to the compile tools;
use this reference to choose ids and interpret the returned clauses.

## Assembly recipe

```
STYLE — <genre>. [<tone>.] [<colour scheme>.]
<camera>. <lens>.
<frame>.
```

`<tone>` is bracketed because it is present only when a tone other than Auto
is chosen (see *Tone — an era recipe*), and `<colour scheme>` only when a
scheme other than Auto is chosen (see *Colour*); Auto contributes no clause,
and so does an `Auto` camera or lens. There is no palette, focal-length or
aperture clause from the setup any more (2026-09-21) and no grain or framing
clause (2026-09-07) — *Retired controls* below. A `palette 60:30:10 — …` clause
appears only when a caller passes a palette id or a colour reference to the
compiler — a shot's own colour, never the setup's.

Lock the assembled prefix in the bible (`bible.stylePrefix`) the moment the user
locks the look at Stage 1 step 2 — that answer is the lock
(2026-09-10; until then it was filed under a Stage 3 gate that no longer
exists). Changing any component afterwards is a new bible version, announced,
never a drift.

### Why these controls and not others

Three of the setup's regions answer questions nothing else in the pipeline
answers:

- **The frame** bounds every generation. A scope landscape film is a different
brief from a vertical one, whatever the genre — and the old six-category set
named neither the frame nor anything like it. It is also the one decision here
that constrains which MODELS can be used at all, so it is not merely a look.
- **Colour is a scheme around a hue, not a palette** (2026-09-21). The film
decides how its colours relate — one hue, neighbours, opposites, a triad —
and which hue it is built around; which exact colours land on which surface
is decided per shot and per location. Seventeen palette presets on the setup
asked the user to pick a whole colour world before a single location existed.
- **The rig is two decisions** (body and glass), because they are the two that
hold for the whole film. Focal length and aperture used to sit beside them and
moved to the shot list (2026-09-21): how wide and how deep is a per-shot
framing decision, and a film-wide 35mm argued with every close-up.

And three old categories are gone because they claimed what something else
already owned: `era` and `stock` both claimed the capture medium, `texture` and
`stock` both claimed grain, and `light` claimed a decision the shot designer has
to make per scene. Camera owns the medium now — and, since 2026-09-07, the
grain, which is a property of the stock and rides in its fragment; the shot
owns its light and its framing (see below). Story period lives where it always
belonged — in the location descriptors and scene context, never in an
image-look preset.

Genre, by contrast, grew: the retired set's `noir` and `epic` are back alongside
`thriller` and `fantasy`, because each names a convention the other does not
imply.

**Tone (2026-09-07) is not `era` coming back.** `era` compiled a medium clause
of its own beside `stock` and `camera` — three answers to one question. A tone
is a *recipe*: picking one sets the Camera and Lens pills to the values that
make a named era of cinema, and adds one short clause for what no pill owns. It
compiles nothing a pill compiles, so the prefix still answers each question
once. It sets no colour (2026-09-21) — *Tone*, below.

## Genre — how scenes are staged and performed

The register every shot inherits.

**Ids:** `drama` · `thriller` · `noir` · `action` · `comedy` · `doc` · `epic` · `fantasy` · `horror` · `romance`

*(The sentence each id compiles to now lives server-side. Pass the id to `picsart_film_compile_prompt` — or `picsart_film_compile_asset_prompt` for a character reference — and it pastes the tuned wording; never write that sentence yourself.)*

**A custom genre compiles without its id in the scene/look compiler.** The card carries `genre: "custom"`
beside `customGenre`, but the compiler has no `custom` genre and refuses it:
pass `look.customGenre` alone and leave `look.genre` out, as the web console
does. A custom tone there uses `look.tone: "custom"` plus `look.customTone`.
The asset compiler has its own top-level schema; inspect its supported fields.

**Noir and epic are their own registers, not flavours of thriller and fantasy.**
Noir owns a lighting and surface convention (slatted hard shadow, wet street,
night-for-night black) that a thriller does not have to use; epic owns scale
against a landscape, which a fantasy does not have to have. Keeping them
separate is also what let the retired console's noir and epic preview clips be
honest (they are in the `picsart-video-plugin` repo) — each was generated from
the fragment above it, verbatim. Fantasy is therefore
worded to claim only what is always fantasy's: the invented world and the
painted light, never "epic imagery" or "scale in the frame", which are epic's.

## Colour — a scheme around a hue

The setup's Colour decision is two values: a **scheme** — how the film's hues
relate — and the **hue** it is built around. That is all the setup says about
colour (2026-09-21).

**Scheme ids:** `auto` · `monochromatic` · `analogous` · `complementary` · `triadic`

**Hue:** one of the wheel's twelve names, one per 30°, red at the top —
`red` 0 · `orange` 30 · `amber` 60 · `lime` 90 · `green` 120 · `jade` 150 ·
`teal` 180 · `sky blue` 210 · `blue` 240 · `violet` 270 · `magenta` 300 ·
`rose` 330. The compiler takes any colour word, but these twelve are what the
console sends, and a colourist's word reads better in a prompt than a degree.
The card carries the angle too, as `hueDegrees`: pre-set it to the name's
angle above, and keep whatever comes back as it was sent — a wheel turned to
130° comes back as `green` + `130`, and only the number reopens it at 130°.
The compilers never read the number.

*(The sentence each scheme compiles to lives server-side — pass `look.scheme` and `look.hue` to `picsart_film_compile_prompt`.)*

| Scheme | What it asks for |
|---|---|
| auto | nothing at film level — each shot picks its own colour |
| monochromatic | one hue, lighter and darker |
| analogous | the hue dominant, its two neighbours supporting |
| complementary | the hue dominant, its opposite used sparingly |
| triadic | three evenly spaced hues — dominant, secondary, accent |

**Rules**

- **Auto is the default and compiles to nothing.** Pre-set a scheme only when
the material names a colour — "everything amber", "a cold blue world", "red
against green". The scheme is the relationship; the hue is the colour named.
- **The colour is always the user's.** No tone sets it or changes it, and
changing it never flips a tone to Auto — "IMAX, built around amber" is a film
someone might want to make.
- **`hue` is read only beside a scheme.** A hue with scheme Auto is dropped.
- **Pass it everywhere the film's look goes** — `look.scheme` / `look.hue`
(inside `look`) on every `picsart_film_compile_prompt`, and top-level `scheme` /
`hue` on every `picsart_film_compile_asset_prompt`, which takes no `look` object
and drops one without an error. Left off the asset call, the shots are graded
to the hue while the cast's references are graded to nothing, and the cast
arrives looking like it belongs to another film.
- **The bible's palette line is written from it.** `bible.palette` names the
scheme's colours in the film's own materials: the dominant is the hue, the
secondary and accent sit where the scheme puts them — analogous, the two
neighbours; complementary, the opposite as the accent; triadic, the two hues a
third of the wheel away; monochromatic, lighter and darker versions of the one
hue. Name each as **a colour plus what carries it** — "amber lamplight on old
plaster", not "amber". A bare hue tells a model nothing about the surface it
lands on, and the palette line's job is to survive into the location
descriptors, so the grade at finishing refines instead of inventing. With
scheme Auto there is no film palette line; each location names its own colours.

### Palettes — the shot's colour, not the setup's

The seventeen palette presets left the setup on 2026-09-21 with the scheme
wheel. They are still the shot list's `palette` value, for a shot that needs a
colour of its own (a flashback, a world the scene crosses into), and still an id
the compiler accepts as `look.palette`. A card's palette is `auto` unless the
shot needs one.

| Preset | Swatches 60 · 30 · 10 |
|---|---|
| slate | #4a5a78 · #8a7a5e · #c4362b |
| sodium | #c87a3a · #1e1a18 · #3fb8c4 |
| bone | #d9cba8 · #a08a64 · #3ea9a0 |
| kitchen | #d9b26a · #6b4a32 · #6e93a8 |
| clinic | #e6e9e8 · #afbab2 · #a81e20 |
| neon | #14161c · #232a4a · #d9319b |
| pine | #2e4034 · #9aa3a0 · #d96a1e |
| fresco | #c1795a · #8a8f63 · #2e4c8f |
| teal | #2f5f66 · #a89272 · #e8621a |
| bleach | #8e9195 · #6b6b52 · #c9b23f |
| mono | #1a1a1c · #8a8a8e · #f5f5f5 |
| pastel | #e8b9bd · #f0e2bd · #cf2a34 |
| sulphur | #7c8340 · #8d9095 · #5e1f27 |
| sepia | #6b4f34 · #a8977f · #4e8b7a |
| kodachrome | #e3c9a0 · #8c9096 · #c8202f |
| lacquer | #9b1c1c · #4a3223 · #2f9c7a |
| ink | #101a2b · #4d5563 · #e8f0ff |

*(The sentence each id compiles to now lives server-side — pass the id to `picsart_film_compile_prompt`.)*

The hexes are for *showing* a palette — a 60:30:10 chip row; the words are what
compile. `mono` is the only preset with no hue: its 10% is a value (one blown
white highlight), not a colour.

**A shot's palette must sit inside the film's scheme.** Every preset already is
a scheme (`sodium` is complementary, `mono` monochromatic), and its first swatch
is its dominant. When a palette's scheme, or its dominant, argues with the film's
scheme and hue, `picsart_film_compile_prompt` returns a warning in `notes` — the prefix
would name two different dominant colours. Do not dispatch past it: tell the
user, then drop the palette or pick one whose dominant is the film's hue.

Choosing between neighbours:

| Preset | Its nearest neighbour, and why they are not the same |
|---|---|
| teal | `sodium` is orange-dominant **night** and `slate` is blue **dusk**. Teal is cold **daylight**. |
| bleach | `clinic` is clean white daylight in a maintained building. Bleach is silver-olive grime and crushed contrast in one nobody maintains. |
| pastel | `fresco` is hot, aged, sun-bleached plaster. Pastel is cool, new and confected. |
| sulphur | `pine` is cold, natural and outdoors. This green comes out of a failing tube and makes everything under it look ill. |
| sepia | `kitchen` is warm **light** on domestic surfaces. Sepia is warm **pigment** — the colour of age, with nothing lit warmly at all. |
| kodachrome | `pastel` is cool and confected; `bone` is drained desert. This is saturated, sun-baked slide-film colour. |
| lacquer | `kitchen` is domestic, `fresco` is bleached. This is saturated pigment on studio surfaces — red lacquer, gold silk, incense haze. |
| ink | `slate` is dusk with the warmth of habitation in it. Ink is night with none: blue-black, wet concrete, one cold point of light. |

**What earns the accent** is per-film, so it is not part of a scheme or a
preset. Decide it while designing the assets and carry it in the asset
descriptors — "the accent belongs to the brothers' car" is a line in the bible,
not a clause in the prefix.

**Swatches** fill the `[HEX Values: …]` field of the modern-path portrait
template — the `imax` tone, and Auto (`film-assets/references/ASSET-SHEETS.md`,
*The portrait prompt*) — **only when a palette id is passed** to
`picsart_film_compile_asset_prompt`. A scheme has no swatches: with a scheme and no
palette the field is left out and named in `notes`, and the scheme clause
carries the colour.

## Tone — an era recipe

The look's second decision, between Genre and Colour. A tone is **a recipe,
not a clause**: picking one sets the Camera and Lens pills to the values that
make a named era of cinema — 1980s American drama, 1990s neon Hong
Kong — and adds **one short clause of its own** for what no pill owns: the
era's name and the optical artefacts that travel with it (halation, bloom,
chromatic aberration, lens breathing, step printing). Everything else a tone
implies is said by the pill it set, once.

Taken from the visual-tone prompts of Zero Shoots' *AI Cinematic Ads
Blueprint* (2026-09-07), rewritten to this file's rule that one prefix
answers each question once. Each source prompt was one paragraph bundling
camera body, lens model, stock, grade, lighting, era, and sometimes ratio and
framing. Compiled beside the rig it would have said "Kodak 5294" next to "35mm
film stock" and "Panavision anamorphic" next to "anamorphic glass" — the
two-instructions failure that retired `era` and `stock`. So each bundle was
taken apart: body and stock → a Camera preset (the five named stocks above),
glass → a Lens preset (`panchro`, `kinoptik`, `cseries` where the source names
one), grain → the stock's own fragment, and the remainder → the tone's own
clause.

**A recipe is the rig and nothing else (2026-09-21).** Until then a recipe also
set a focal length, an aperture and a colour preset. All three left it when they
left the setup: focal length and aperture are per shot now, and the colour is
the user's — a tone is a way of rendering, not a colour. Dune and Oppenheimer
are both large-format IMAX and neither is blue, so an era that dictated a
palette was deciding something the user had not asked it to. (`kodachrome`,
`lacquer` and `ink` were added for the old recipes and stay as shot palettes.)

**What a tone clause may not contain**: a camera body or stock, a lens choice,
a focal length or aperture, grain, any lighting, an aspect ratio, framing, a
camera move, or a named person. The first eight belong to a pill or to the
shot; the last is an IP exposure a shipped preset does not take — the source
tones cite directors and cinematographers by name, and the technique words
carry the look without them. Colour language in a clause is **grade
character** (saturation, how shadows and highlights split), never a list of
hues: hues are the colour scheme's. `Kodachrome` in the summer tone's clause
is the book's own colour word, and that recipe's Camera is generic 35mm, so it
is not a second stock statement.

| Preset | Sets |
|---|---|
| auto | *(nothing)* |
| italian60 | camera `technicolor` · lens `panchro` |
| american80 | camera `5294` · lens `ana` |
| summer80 | camera `35mm` · lens `ana` |
| hongkong80 | camera `35mm` · lens `vintage` |
| neonhk90 | camera `500t` · lens `kinoptik` |
| american90 | camera `5298` · lens `ana` |
| imax | camera `imax` · lens `cseries` |

*(The sentence each id compiles to now lives server-side — pass the id to `picsart_film_compile_prompt`.)*

The source set had eight; *Modern A24 / Indie Drama* is not shipped. It failed
this file's nearest-neighbour test against `american90`: both desaturated,
natural light, shallow focus, anamorphic — the only difference was Alexa with
film emulation against real 5298 stock, and "warm skin against a cool
environment", which `american90` already says. It can come back when it has a
fragment `american90` does not imply.

**Rules**

- **Auto is the default and compiles to nothing.** The defaults below
are already a filmic look; a tone is an opinion about an era, and no film
holds one until someone picks it. The source book's default is its "Modern
Digital / IMAX" tone; here that is `imax`, one choice among seven, because
"cold and desolate" is a grade, not a neutral.
- **Changing the Camera or the Lens flips the tone to Auto.** The pills keep
the values they have (that film is the user's now) and the tone's clause
leaves the prefix, so the prefix never claims an era whose recipe was edited.
Colour, Frame, Duration and Genre are not part of any recipe and do
not flip it — a user who turns the colour wheel keeps their era.
- **Grain rides in the stock, not in a control.** The Grain and
Framing controls were retired on 2026-09-07 (*Retired controls* below) —
the first said what the stock fragment already says, and the second pasted
"default to medium shots" into every prompt of a film whose tone said
nothing about framing, exactly the kind of addition that breaks a source
tone. Fuji 500T says "heavy grain" itself; the Hong Kong studio clause
carries "vintage film texture".
- **Lighting is not carried.** Every source tone named a lighting setup —
neon practicals only, a golden-hour key with fluorescent fill, soft stage
light. Lighting is per shot (`../../film-scenes/references/PRESETS-LIGHTING.md`),
whose library already has `night practical`, `practicals`, `golden hour` and
`street light` for exactly these looks. A film-wide lighting hint was
considered and dropped (2026-09-07).
- **Story period is still not a look.** "80s settings" in a source prompt is
when the story happens; it lives in the location descriptors and the scene
context, as before. The character sheets inherit the tone through the style
prefix, but era styling of the *person* — hair, grooming, wardrobe — is the
descriptor's job, not the tone's: the assets stage writes the cast to the
tone's era, and when the story's period disagrees it says so once and the
user decides (`film-assets/SKILL.md`, *The conveyor*, step 1).
- **Seeding.** Pre-set a tone by writing its id and the two pills it sets.
Expand the recipe *before* applying any pill the material names explicitly,
so an explicit pill always wins over the recipe. An unknown id is dropped
like any other.
- **Every tone but Auto now plays a clip (2026-09-10).** The seven probes are
in `tone-previews/` in the plugin repo — four seconds each, one control (a
woman at the wheel through an open driver's window). They were generated
while the recipes still carried a palette, so the colour in a tone's clip is
not part of the tone. The row is clips, not stills,
because three of these clauses name artefacts a single frame cannot hold:
step-printed stutter, flicker, lens breathing. `Auto` compiles nothing, so it
keeps its gradient and always will. The gradient stays under every clip as
the ground it paints over.

## Lighting is not a film-wide decision — it lives on the shot

There is no light control here, and there is no `light` clause in the prefix.
The setup used to carry eight lighting presets alongside genre and colour, and
they were the one look decision that could not honestly be made once for a whole
film: a film has one genre and one colour scheme, but a night exterior and a
kitchen morning are not lit the same way, and no film worth making is.

What made it a bug rather than a limitation is that the clause was pasted into
**every** prompt. A prefix saying `soft motivated daylight, wrapping key from a
window` arrived at the shot designer's Lighting block — which is built on one
motivated source, its direction named, and which side of the face is dark
(`PRESETS-LIGHTING.md`) — and contradicted it on every night, practical and
firelight shot in the film. Two lighting instructions in one prompt is worse
than one, and the shot's is the one that knows what room it is in.

So lighting is decided where the scene is: the shot list's `Light` value and the
closed question that asks for it, both from `PRESETS-LIGHTING.md`. The film-wide
mood that used to be smuggled through this control belongs in **genre** (noir
owns chiaroscuro; doc owns available light) and in **colour** — the scheme,
and the palette line the locations carry, which names what the light lands on.

`light` therefore joins `era`, `stock` and `texture` as a **retired v1 key**: an
old project record that carries it is read past, not honoured.

## Delivery — the bounds every generation inherits

### Frame

**Every frame here is one video models render BROADLY, and that is the whole
selection rule.** Checked against every video model's own `aspectRatio` enum
(`list_models`, mode video, 2026-08-31). The list this replaced offered
nine, of which five were fiction: **no** model accepts 2.39:1, 1.85:1 or 4:5;
`2:1` exists on Flux 3 Video alone and `3:2` on Grok and PixVerse alone. Worse,
2.39:1 was the DEFAULT — so a film that never touched this control opened by
promising a frame the pipeline could not deliver, generations came back in
whatever the model does support, and the style prefix went on claiming
anamorphic scope for the whole film.

Ordered widest to tallest, which is also how the picker draws them (the glyphs
are true-proportion boxes, so a support-ordered list would look scrambled).

| Preset | Shown as | Renders on |
|---|---|---|
| 169 | 16:9 | every model |
| 43 | 4:3 | most models |
| sq | 1:1 | most models |
| 34 | 3:4 | most models |
| vert | 9:16 | every model |

*(The sentence each id compiles to now lives server-side — pass the id to `picsart_film_compile_prompt`.)*

**16:9 is the widest frame offered, and scope is a crop in the edit.** 21:9
exists on Seedance, Luma, Hailuo, Flux and PixVerse and is deliberately NOT
offered: putting a frame that works on five model families beside frames that
work everywhere invites a director to pick the one choice that later rules out
most of their models. If the user asks for scope, say so plainly — "no video
model renders 2.39:1, and 21:9 would tie us to a handful of models; shoot 16:9
and crop to scope in the edit, which is how anamorphic dailies are handled
anyway" — rather than treating the gap as an oversight.

### Say the frame however it comes up — every spelling resolves

**You do not have to remember `vert`.** The preset id, the label and the plain
word all name the same frame, so all of these select 9:16:

```
vert · 9:16 · 9x16 · vertical · portrait · phone · tiktok · reels · shorts · story
```

Same for the rest: `16:9` / `landscape` / `widescreen` / `wide` → `169`; `1:1` /
`square` → `sq`; `4:3` → `43`; `3:4` → `34`. Case and surrounding spaces do not
matter.

**This tolerance exists because of a real defect.** A user asked for vertical in
chat and the setup opened on a landscape frame anyway: the pre-set was made
with the obvious value (`9:16`), validated against the opaque ids,
found no match, and dropped — so the user was shown the default wearing the
clothes of a decision. Anything genuinely unrecognisable still falls back to the
default rather than being guessed at, because a guess presented as a decision
already made is that same defect.

**A locked film on a retired frame resolves rather than resetting.** Every
retired frame was landscape and 16:9 is now the only landscape frame, so
`239`, `2.39:1`, `219`, `21:9`, `185`, `2`, `2:1`, `32` and `3:2` all read as
`169`. That is exactly right for the `239` population, which is nearly every film
locked so far: they were not choosing scope, they were not touching the control.
The one retired portrait frame, `45` (4:5), reads as `34` — a 4:5 film was
deliberately tall.

### Shot length — not here any more

**Shot length left this decision on 2026-08-31.** It is a per-shot call on the
shot list, whose Length value offers exactly the durations the chosen model
accepts — a guard the film-wide version never had. It used to offer
4/6/8/10/15/20/25/30s
as a film-wide default, so a film that locked "25s shots" was writing a promise
the model was free to refuse.

`shotlen` is a retired key: an old project record still naming it is read past,
like `era` and `light`. One frame-shaped decision belongs to the film; how long
any one shot runs belongs to the shot.

### Duration — the whole film, not one shot

`duration` is the film's target running time in seconds. It is a number rather
than a preset: any positive whole number is valid, and the default is
`90`. The user may say it as a number or naturally (`47
seconds`, `1:30`, `2.5 minutes`); record it as a whole number of seconds.
This is the total the preliminary shot list is planned to hit and the
animatic later checks within ±10%; it never constrains an individual shot or the
model used to render it.

Like `handles`, Duration compiles to nothing in the style prefix. It is
stored as a number in `film.json.target.duration`, not in
`bible.setup`: runtime is a production bound, not a visual-world clause.

### Handles — the film's generation policy

The MCP setup console no longer displays or returns `handles`. Keep the film's
existing handle policy independently; a missing key in setup feedback does not
turn it off. When the policy changes, record the user's decision and include
its duration cost in the normal generation preflight.

The run-level rules live in `../../film-scenes/SKILL.md`: handles belong only
at the two outer ends of a generated run, not around every internal shot.
`on` requests trim room within the live model ceiling; `off` requests the
planned cut length. Handle policy contributes no STYLE clause.

## Camera — two independent decisions

What it is shot on, and how the glass renders. Both lead with **`auto`, which
compiles to nothing.** A user with no opinion about the glass says so in one
click rather than being made to invent one, and a prefix with no lens clause is
better than one with a guessed clause. How wide and how deep each shot is are
not here: focal length and aperture are per shot (*Retired controls*, below).

### Camera — what it is shot on

Owns the capture medium: body, stock, and the artefacts that come with it.

**Ids:** `auto` · `alexa` · `red` · `35mm` · `16mm` · `super8` · `camcorder` · `phone` · `technicolor` · `5294` · `500t` · `5298` · `imax`

**The last five are named stocks with their bodies, added for the tone recipes
(2026-09-07).** The source tone prompts name the body and the stock — "Arriflex
35 BL4, Kodak 5294", "Fuji 500T pushed two stops" — because those names carry
colour rendering, grain and highlight behaviour in words the model has seen
millions of times. Camera owns the capture medium, body and stock alike, so both
live here in one fragment, chosen by a tone or by hand; a tone never says either
name a second time in its own clause.

### Lens — how the glass renders

A lens **family**, never a focal length: how the glass draws the picture is a
film-level decision; how wide it is belongs to each shot on the shot list.

| Id | On the card |
|---|---|
| auto | Auto |
| prime | Spherical |
| ana | Anamorphic |
| vintage | Vintage spherical |
| vintage-ana | Vintage anamorphic |
| macro | Macro |
| fisheye | Fisheye |
| probe | Probe / periscope |
| tilt | Tilt-shift |
| panchro | Cooke Speed Panchro |
| kinoptik | Kinoptik ultra-wide |
| cseries | Panavision C-series |

The eight after Auto are the families (2026-09-21); the last three are the named
lenses the tone recipes use. `zoom` is **retired** (2026-09-21): a zoom is a
focal-length behaviour, not a way the glass renders, so it left with the focal
length. A film locked with it still compiles — `zoom` just adds nothing — and it
reopens as `auto`. `fisheye` deliberately asks for the curvature a straight-line
shot would forbid: pick it only when the user wants the whole film warped.

**A lens describes glass; it never describes the shape of the frame
(2026-09-13).** Both anamorphic rows used to end on *"wide compressed frame"*,
and on a vertical film that is a straight contradiction with the line beside it:
a real prompt compiled to *"…wide compressed frame. 35mm: natural reportage
framing. shot at f/4… framed vertically for 9:16"* — the model was told in one
breath that the picture is wide and that it is tall. The frame's shape belongs to
the Ratio preset alone, which is the only thing that knows what the film chose,
and it says so in every prompt already. What the glass actually does — oval
bokeh, horizontal flares, softness, distortion toward the edges — is true at any
ratio, so that is all these rows say now. Anamorphic's squeeze is real optics,
but the wide picture is what a *projector* does with it, not what the lens
renders, and a vertical film never gets there.

Checked across every preset in this file when the fix was made: these two were
the only fragments claiming a frame shape.

**The last three are named lenses, added for the tone recipes (2026-09-07)**,
for the same reason as the named stocks: the glass a source tone names is part
of what makes its era read. Lens owns the glass, so each lives here as a normal
preset and a tone's own clause never repeats it. `kinoptik` deliberately does
not state a focal length — each shot's lens owns that.

## Retired controls

### Focal length, Aperture and the palette presets — moved to the shot (2026-09-21)

**The setup's Focal length and Aperture pills are gone, and so are its
seventeen palette presets.** Each was a decision a film-wide value could only
get wrong for most of its shots: a film-wide 35mm argued with every close-up, a
film-wide f/2.8 with every wide that needed the room in focus, and a film-wide
palette decided the colour of locations nobody had designed yet.

- **Focal length** is the shot card's `lens` — a field-of-view anchor proposed
from the shot size (`../../film-scenes/references/PRESETS-CAMERA.md`, *FOV*).
- **Aperture** is the shot's own (`PRESETS-CAMERA.md`, *Aperture / depth*).
- **Palette** is the shot card's `palette`, `auto` unless the shot needs a
colour of its own; the film's colour is its scheme and hue (*Colour*, above).

`focal` and `aperture` are retired setup keys: an old record naming them keeps
its stored prefix verbatim, and they are read past when the setup is re-opened.
A stored palette preset reopens as `auto`.

### Grain and Framing — not here any more (2026-09-07)

**The "More controls" switch is gone, and the two rows behind it with it.**
`Grain` compiled a texture clause beside a Camera fragment that already named
one — "35mm film stock: organic grain" — and the named stocks added for the
tone recipes carry theirs outright ("Fuji 500T pushed two stops: heavy grain"),
so it was a second answer to a question Camera owns. `Framing` compiled
"default to medium shots, figure plus readable room" into every prompt of the
film, while the shot list decides size per shot from the same nine-rung ladder
(`../../film-scenes/references/PRESETS-CAMERA.md`): a world-level default there
was the Movement mistake again, and because the two rows shared one switch,
naming either compiled both. The rows that used to be here: Grain — `clean`,
`fine`, `heavy`, `tape`; Framing — the ladder's `ECU` … `EWS` as "default to
<size>". Grain that a film wants is said by its Camera preset; framing is a shot
card's `size`.

`grain` and `shot` are retired keys: an old project record still naming either is
read past, like `move` and `pace`. Neither is part of the setup any more (they
were optional, present only with the switch open, so nothing downstream could
have relied on them).

### Movement — not here any more

**Camera movement left this decision on 2026-08-31**, for the same reason
lighting did: a world-level move is pasted into **every** prompt of the film,
before any shot has a subject or a direction, so it argued with the shot list's
own `Camera move` value on every shot that had chosen one. A shot that had
already asked for `Orbit` was overruled by a style prefix chosen before the shot
existed.

The move is a per-shot decision, from all 50 moves in
`../../film-scenes/references/PRESETS-CAMERA.md` — the same library the shot
list's `Camera move` control and the review board's direction panel draw, so a
move still means one thing across the film.

`move` is a retired key: an old project record still naming it is read past.

### Pacing — retired (2026-09-04)

There is no pacing control on any surface now — not here, not the shot list's
`Temp` value, not the review card's direction. It was a four-step scale (calm /
steady / restless / urgent) that compiled to one tempo adjective, and its
defaults sat at the slow end: every film that opened the switch was told
"cuts only after a moment plays out, shots at rest" before a beat existed, and
every cut header repeated `pace calm`. Films came out slow.

Rhythm is **written, never set**: the shot blocks' seconds say how many
beats a cut holds and how long each runs, and the card's `sec` says how long
the shot is. Tempo words (slow, calm, measured, brisk, urgent) do not appear
in the prefix or in a header; a shot that should feel slow has less happening
in more seconds. A stored setup or plan still carrying `pace` seeds nothing and
is written back without it.

## Defaults — what the setup starts from

```
genre drama · tone auto · colour auto (no scheme)
frame 169 · duration 90
camera 35mm · lens ana
```

These are a defensible film, not a placeholder: nothing is ever blocked
waiting for input, and there is no "incomplete setup" state. They are what you
state and invite correction on.

**The frame default is the one you must not leave to chance.** `169` is here
because it is the single frame every video model renders — not because the film
is landscape. A default cannot read the user's mind, but you can: the moment they
say vertical, portrait, phone, TikTok, Reels, Shorts, square, widescreen or
scope, pre-set the frame to what they said. A user who asked for vertical and got
landscape was not given a default, they were given the wrong answer.

## Infer first — never ask what the material already answers

Because everything already has a default, a pre-set is not one fewer blank to
fill — it is **a better starting point than the default**. Fill only what the
script, logline, or moodboard actually decides, each with a one-line why: a
palace-intrigue logline answers `genre`; an all-photochemical moodboard answers
`camera` (a found-footage premise answers it too — `camcorder` carries its own
noise); a script that names a period or a cinema tradition — "Hong Kong, 1994", "like a seventies Italian drama" —
answers `tone`, and the recipe is expanded into the pills before the picks are
shown; a brief that names a colour — "everything amber", "cold blue" — answers
`scheme` and `hue`.

Leave the rest alone. A wrong pre-set is worse than a default, because the user
reads it as a decision someone already made.

## Running the setup from this file

Open `picsart_film_setup` with the inferred values in `suggested.selections`
and the reason for each in `suggested.why`. On reopening, pass the locked
values as `current.selections`, including `hueDegrees`. Store submitted
`film_setup_feedback` per `WIDGET-FEEDBACK.md`; an initial tool result is a
preview, not approval. If the console is unavailable, use the host's question
interface or a concise text choice with the same values.

Compile the accepted setup with `picsart_film_compile_prompt`, `kind: "look"`,
when its returned style prefix is empty. Map `ratio` to `look.frame`, omit a
`custom` genre id while passing `look.customGenre`, and preserve custom tone
wording. Keep the returned prefix verbatim. The asset compiler takes its colour
fields at the top level, as documented under Colour.

SHA-256: ac15670884a6e162dfcc8c0c63b3fbb05a320b5612ebe272c71cf027916e5bc9