Most "AI script tools" assume one shape: a feature screenplay. Real production has at least five — and the joints between them are exactly where pipelines break. Module 02 makes the format part of the data, not part of the tool.
01The problem
A series episode is split into cold open / acts / tag. A musical track is split into verses, chorus, bridge. A commercial breaks at hook, pitch, CTA. A documentary breaks by topic and B-roll. The vocabulary is different, the beats are different, the file outputs are different. Most teams maintain five different scripts to handle this — or pretend everything is a movie and patch the joints later.
We did neither. We made the format a property of the project, and taught the same expansion engine to obey different rules under different presets.
02The approach
Each project carries a PROJECT.json manifest with a content_format field. That single field reroutes the whole pipeline — file naming (EPISODE_SEQ01 for movies, EPISODE_SEC01 for musicals), prompt scaffolds, beat grammar, and downstream module behaviour. The expansion runs in four steps — premise, beat sheet, scene list, scripted dialogue — but each step asks format-specific questions.
The musical preset, for example, generates a FULL_SONG_SCRIPT.txt as the single source of truth and treats every section as a verse-aware unit so chorus repetition stays musically coherent. The documentary preset asks for sources and B-roll cues alongside narration. The series preset enforces an act structure and watches the runtime budget.
"Format-aware was the unlock. The minute we stopped pretending a music video was a short film, the whole pipeline got faster."
03Inside the control panel
The panel surfaces the four expansion steps in a fixed left-to-right flow. Each step writes its output to disk before the next can run, so the operator can stop, edit, and resume without losing state.
- Format selector. One dropdown rewires the entire prompt graph and file-naming convention. No code change required.
- Step gating. Step 2 won't run until Step 1 is on disk. Errors stay local — a failed Step 3 doesn't corrupt Step 1.
- Voiceover extraction. Pulls speaker-tagged dialogue out of the script in a format ready for TTS, with line IDs that survive into the storyboard.
- Asset scan. Cross-references the script against Module 01's cast — flags any character or prop that hasn't been sheeted yet.
04What's next
The active push is cross-format adaptation — taking a feature treatment and re-projecting it as a six-episode series, or a 90-second commercial, with the manifest doing the heavy lifting. Same story, different shapes, no rewrite. After that: a presets registry that lets a studio ship its own house format alongside ours.