Creative Video StudioBacklot
All pipelines
beta
Documentary
v1.0

Documentary Montage

Retrieval-first thematic montage pipeline. Builds a semantic corpus of real-world footage from Pexels, Archive.org (Prelinger et al.), NASA, Wikimedia Commons, and Unsplash, then uses CLIP-based retrieval to fill slot descriptions from a thematic brief. The edit arranges clips by narrative beat with music sync and uniform color grade across mixed-era footage. Inspired by Adam Curtis / Chris Marker / Errol Morris tone poems.

Stages
5
Human approval gates
4
Default budget
$1.00

Stages

The agent reads each stage's director skill before working, then writes a checkpoint. Stages marked pause for your approval before the production continues.

  1. 1

    Idea

    Human approval

    openmontage/skills/pipelines/documentary-montage/idea-director.md

    Produces

    • brief

    Tools

    None — agent reasoning only

    Review focus

    • Thematic question is ONE sentence
    • Tone register is ONE value from the fixed list
    • Duration and shape are concrete
    • Music plan is present (MANDATORY — silent only if user explicitly opted out)
    • End-tag plan is present (MANDATORY — one philosophical closing line, rendered as Remotion end-card, default mode "overlay" on final scenes, unless user explicitly opted out)
    • Narration plan is present (narration itself is OPTIONAL — absence is fine if music + visuals + end-tag carry the register)

    Success criteria

    • Schema-valid brief artifact
    • thematic_question present in metadata
    • music_plan present in metadata (source may be `none` ONLY with explicit user opt-out note)
    • end_tag_plan present in metadata (text, palette, duration, mode — may be `null` ONLY with explicit user opt-out note)
  2. 2

    Scene Plan

    Human approval

    openmontage/skills/pipelines/documentary-montage/scene-director.md

    Produces

    • scene_plan

    Tools

    None — agent reasoning only

    Review focus

    • Slot descriptions use concrete noun-and-adjective language
    • Every slot has 2-3 short search queries
    • At least 2 slots are marked hero
    • Slot count and target holds match the tone/duration math
    • era_mix is reflected in preferred_sources distribution

    Success criteria

    • Schema-valid scene_plan artifact
    • metadata.slots[] present with per-slot queries and preferred_sources
    • Sum of target_hold_seconds within 10% of brief.duration_seconds
  3. 3

    Assets

    Human approval

    openmontage/skills/pipelines/documentary-montage/asset-director.md

    Produces

    • asset_manifest

    Tools

    • direct_clip_search
    • corpus_builder
    • clip_search
    • music_gen

    Review focus

    • Every slot has exactly one picked clip
    • No clip_id is picked for two slots
    • Provenance (provider, original_url, license) present on every asset
    • Standard path: corpus size >= 8x slot count, scores >= 0.22, diversify ran clean
    • Fast path: thumbnails inspected, cross-act reuse noted, gaps filled
    • rejected_picks log has reasons for passes (standard path)

    Success criteria

    • Schema-valid asset_manifest artifact
    • One video asset per scene slot
    • metadata.corpus_stats present (standard path) OR metadata.search_stats present (fast path)
  4. 4

    Edit

    Human approval

    openmontage/skills/pipelines/documentary-montage/edit-director.md

    Produces

    • edit_decisions

    Tools

    None — agent reasoning only

    Review focus

    • renderer_family is locked to documentary-montage
    • Hero slots hold longest; mid-sequence cutaways shortest
    • No two adjacent cuts share subject AND scale
    • Transition vocabulary is at most 4 distinct values
    • Music config is present (MANDATORY — silent only if brief.metadata.music_plan.source=none with explicit opt-out note)
    • End-tag timing is present (MANDATORY — overlay mode: end_tag.offset_seconds in edit_decisions; concat mode: end-tag appended after body. Unless brief.metadata.end_tag_plan is null with explicit opt-out note)
    • total_duration_seconds matches sum of cut durations (body only — end-tag overlay does not extend duration; concat mode adds tag duration)
    • Every cut has a reason

    Success criteria

    • Schema-valid edit_decisions artifact
    • Timeline duration within 10% of brief.duration_seconds
  5. 5

    Compose

    Auto checkpoint

    openmontage/skills/pipelines/documentary-montage/compose-director.md

    Produces

    • render_report

    Tools

    • video_compose
    • audio_mixer
    • color_grade
    • video_trimmer
    • video_stitch

    Review focus

    • Output duration matches planned within 1s (body duration for overlay mode; body + tag for concat mode)
    • Resolution matches target_platform canvas
    • Uniform LUT applied across the timeline
    • Music is mixed in (MANDATORY — silent output only with explicit user opt-out recorded in brief)
    • render_runtime locked at proposal MUST stay 'remotion' on this pipeline until HyperFrames end-tag parity lands — the overlay/concat end-tag stack depends on Remotion CinematicRenderer components. Silent swap to hyperframes or ffmpeg is a CRITICAL governance violation.
    • End-tag rendered via Remotion (MANDATORY — absence only with explicit opt-out). Default mode: overlay (ProRes 4444 with alpha composited on final scenes). Fallback: concat (opaque card appended after body).
    • Overlay mode: extract a frame from the overlay region and verify text is visible over footage, not over black. Concat mode: last frame must be the end-tag card.
    • No silent fallback from a motion-led promise

    Success criteria

    • Schema-valid render_report artifact
    • Output file exists and passes ffprobe validation
    • render_report.end_tag_rendered = true (or explicit opt-out)
    • render_report.end_tag_mode = "overlay" or "concat"
    • render_report.music_mixed = true (or explicit opt-out)

Manifest: openmontage/pipeline_defs/documentary-montage.yaml. Director skills live under openmontage/skills/.