Arcs that remember where they are going

Arc notes are the engine

Arc notes are private text attached to a thread. They can be a sentence or a paragraph: where the storyline begins, what it is secretly about, the midpoint turn, the ending you are protecting. The braid planner reads them alongside the episodes so far, so a draft for episode six knows both what happened in episodes one to five and what should happen by episode ten.

Because the notes are separate from the synopses, you can change your mind about an ending without rewriting history. Update the notes, draft the next braid, and the new direction takes over from the next column onward.

Reading an arc on the board

Each row on the braid board is an arc in progress. The filled cells are the steps taken; the empty cells are the rests. Hover a planned beat and you see its heading; open it and you see the scene text and whether a take has been rendered. A thread can be marked resolved when its arc lands, and the planner will stop advancing it while still letting its characters appear in other threads’ scenes if the notes allow.

This is especially useful for series with staggered arcs: thread A resolves at episode eight, thread B at episode fourteen, thread C runs to the end. The board shows the staggering as rows that end at different columns.

• Arc notes up to 1,200 characters per thread, private to you
• Threads can be marked open or resolved
• Every draft includes the thread’s arc notes and the episode history
• A writer’s note on any draft overrides the plan for that one episode

From a step to a scene to a take

The planner writes each arc step as a filmable scene: one location, up to three of the thread’s cast, one spoken line, playable as a single take of 4 to 15 seconds. That constraint is what makes an arc shootable. You can lengthen a step into two scenes by adding a beat by hand, but the default keeps each step small and the episode cheap.

When you shoot, the take studio shows the price before you commit (for example, a standard 720p eight-second take costs 48 credits) and refuses to charge anything else. Finished takes slot into the row and column they were planned for, and the episode weaves in braid order.

Arcs for a single character

Nothing stops a thread from being one person. A thread called The pilot with a single cast member and a tight arc is a perfectly good row. Series that follow three people in three places are a natural fit: one thread each, with arc notes describing how their stories converge.