skills/ai-film-pipeline-master/references/phase-08-video-prompt-engineering/the-notes-round.md

# The notes round — what happens after the first delivery

2 cards, both `notes.*`.

**The pipeline runs from brief to delivery and then stops, and no commissioned job does.** Every
piece that was paid for comes back with notes, and the notes round is where more work is destroyed
than in any phase before it — not by bad notes, but by good notes applied to the wrong layer.

This file sits at the delivery end because that is where it is reached, but it points upstream: most
of the expensive notes are notes about Phase 1 arriving in Phase 8's inbox.

---

### Reading What a Note Actually Asks For

**Also called:** note interpretation, the note behind the note, diagnosis before revision
**What it is:** The pass between receiving a note and acting on it. A note is almost always a **symptom** stated as a **prescription**: the person watching felt something wrong at a particular moment, and what they hand over is a proposed fix at that moment. Acting on the prescription without diagnosing the symptom is how a piece gets worse in exactly the way the note was trying to prevent.
**Effect on the audience:** They never see the note, only the version that came out of it. A misread note produces a piece that is visibly patched — the fix sits on top of the problem rather than in it, and the next viewer feels the seam without knowing what it is.
**Used for and where it works best:** Every round of notes on every commissioned piece. **Separate the observation from the solution, and keep only the observation.** "Can we cut the opening shot" is a solution; the observation underneath is usually *I was not held at the start*, and the shot may be the only thing in the sequence that is working. **Find where the note was actually generated, which is rarely where it was written** — a note at 3:40 that the ending feels unearned is a note about what was set up at 0:30, and cutting at 3:40 cannot fix it. **A note repeated by two people who have not spoken is a fact**, whatever they each proposed; a note from one person is information and may be taste. **And a note about something that is not on screen is the most valuable kind** — confusion, boredom, disbelief — because the viewer has located a hole the maker cannot see from inside. Restate every note as the observation you think it is and send that restatement back before you cut: half the time the reply corrects you, which is far cheaper than a revision that did.
**Best in:** formats: Commercial / TVC, Brand Film, Corporate / Training, Documentary Feature, Documentary Series, Explainer, Music Video, Trailer and Teaser, Vertical Short-Form (Reels, Shorts, TikTok) | genres: all
**Avoid when:** The note is not a craft note at all. A legal line, a factual correction, a compliance requirement or a safeguarding instruction is not a symptom to be diagnosed — it is a constraint, and it gets executed rather than interpreted.
**Example:**
> *Note as received:* "The middle is slow — can we lose the workshop sequence?"
>
> *Restated and sent back:* "Reading this as: attention drops around 2:10 and the workshop is where you felt it. The workshop is also where the object is explained — if it goes, the ending has nothing to land on. Proposing we shorten it by half and move the explanation earlier, rather than cut it. Is the note about the length, or about the information?"
>
> *The reply:* "The information. I already knew all that by then."
>
> — which is a completely different edit, in a different place, and the original prescription would have removed the only sequence that was working.
`notes.read_the_note`

---

### Which Notes Cost a Rebuild

**Also called:** the layer a note lands on, upstream notes, revision cost triage
**What it is:** The triage that separates a note that can be answered in the edit from a note that reaches back into a locked decision. This pipeline locks things in order — the spine in Phase 1, the words in Phase 2, the durations and the shot table in Phase 3 or 4, the boards in Phase 6, the stills in Phase 7, the motion in Phase 8 — and **a note lands on one of those layers whether or not it is phrased that way.** The cost of a note is not its size; it is how far upstream it lands and how much was built on top of that point.
**Effect on the audience:** None. This card protects the schedule and the budget, and it exists because the alternative is discovering the cost after agreeing to the note.
**Used for and where it works best:** At the moment a notes list arrives, before a single reply is written. **Sort every note by the layer it touches, and price it in what gets rebuilt rather than in what gets changed.** Some worked examples of the same-sized note costing wildly different amounts: a wording change inside an existing line is a re-record of one line; a change to *what the piece argues* is Phase 1 and everything after it is now wrong; a new shot is a still, a motion clip and a place in the cut; a change to the runtime re-cuts everything if the audio was measured and almost nothing if the durations were designed. **Say the cost out loud when you accept the note, not when you deliver it** — "yes, and that reopens the shot table" is a sentence that gets a note withdrawn or gets the time paid for, and it can only be said before the work starts. **And write down which notes were declined and why**, because the same note arrives again in the next round from a different person, and the record is what stops it being re-litigated for free.
**Best in:** formats: Commercial / TVC, Brand Film, Corporate / Training, Documentary Feature, Documentary Series, Explainer, Animated Series, Music Video, Trailer and Teaser | genres: all
**Avoid when:** The piece is your own and nobody is paying for it. Triaging your own notes by cost is a good way to protect bad work — there, take the expensive note.
**Yields to:** `rights.cleared_before_locked` — a note that settles a rights question the brief itself raised outranks its own cost; the skill adds no rights step of its own.
`notes.cost_of_the_layer`

---

## Coverage

Two cards: reading a note before acting on it, and knowing what acting on it costs. **Neither is
about how to answer a note you disagree with**, which is not a craft problem — it is a conversation
about authority over the piece, and who has it was settled in the commission, not here.