A persistent, multi-faceted draft of the film, evolving in dialogue with the director. Not a script, not a timeline, not a shot list — the connective tissue underneath all of them. The Living Story is the artifact we hold. The film is held by you.
Stories are alive. So are the people making them, and so is the process. A film in production is not a spreadsheet that gets filled in — it grows and changes daily, and it should be held by something that does the same. That is the whole reason for the name.
Five tools that each did one job well. The Living Story is what happens when they stop being five tools.
The record holds pointers to where each part of a shot lives — never a copy of it. That one decision is why nothing drifts.
The design rule the whole system is built onEveryone on a production already keeps their own version of the truth. A folder, a chat thread, a spreadsheet they trust more than yours.
Every department has a seat here — a working surface built for that craft, reading from the same record. Not a shared drive with permissions on it. The gaffer draws a plan; the editor works in Resolve; the director assigns a shot. They are all touching one object.
Every one of those surfaces is agent-enabled. Every one is flown by human hands. Agents advise, never supersede — they propose, the specialist accepts, overrides or ignores, and they can be switched off entirely without the surface losing anything. Decades of craft in a real crew is the gold here, and none of this is built to replace it.
What it does instead is give each department the reach of a whole team. Every crew member becomes a director in their own right.
Not messages about the work. The work.
The director assigns a shot to a department and it appears in that department's board — not in an inbox, not in a thread. The assignment and the shot are the same object.
The gaffer draws the plan view — fixtures, positions, aims. It compiles into the shot's own fields, so a relamp reaches forty shots as a change, not forty edits.
The editor works in Resolve. What they changed — trims, new takes, dropped shots — comes back into the record as a diff you can read, shot by shot.
A projection. Never the artifact.
Your editor gets an AAF. Your colourist gets an EDL and a grade handoff. Production gets a breakdown CSV, a shot list, a call sheet, a schedule. Each one is generated from the current state, in the format that tool already expects, and each one is derived — recomputed on demand, never the source of truth.
When the editor pushes a new cut, it does not overwrite anything. It arrives as an update to one facet, attributable and versioned, and the record absorbs it. Every collaborator works in their own tool and never touches ours.
And what we deliberately do not hold.
Not your camera files. Not your Resolve project. Not your masters or your graded frames. Those stay yours, on your storage, authoritative where they already live — the record points at them. We hold the understanding of the film, not the film.
The Living Story is not a product we licence. It is the artifact we hold while a production runs — the reason we can quote what we quote, and the reason the work comes back whole. You get the projections. We keep the engine. If you have a job that needs it, bring us the job.