Works: big projects like animated comics

Some things do not fit in one conversation. An animated comic has dozens or hundreds of panels, several episodes, and a whole cast of characters. You settle what the lead looks like today and come back three days later to keep drawing — and if all of that only lives inside one chat, the next chat cannot find it.

A work exists for exactly this. It sits alongside apps, with its own entry in your profile, but it is not something you ship: no domain, no deployment, no releases. It holds the creative material itself and nothing else.

When you get one

Ask in a chat for an animated comic, a sticker pack or an AI short drama. The assistant talks the idea through with you first, then creates a work, and from that point every drawing, reference sheet and piece of material lives inside it.

The reverse is also true: small jobs do not need a work. A few illustrations or a fifteen-second clip are faster asked for directly in a chat. A work earns its keep once there is more material than you can keep track of, once it spans several days, and once there is an episode or chapter structure to it.

What the list looks like

The Works entry in your profile shows a row of cards, just like Apps: a cover image, the name, the category, and a line of counts — how many episodes, how many pieces of material. You do not upload the cover yourself; the first reference image you make becomes it. To change the cover, the title or the summary, open the work and use Edit in the top right.

A work has no progress bar. A work only ever grows — a comic keeps gaining episodes, a sticker set keeps gaining packs, a drama keeps gaining episodes — so there is no moment where it is "done", and "step 3 of 7" stops being true the next day. What you get instead is a material checklist: 3 character sheets, episodes 1-2 fully drawn, 4 panels still missing in episode 3, no voice-over yet. You and the assistant read the same checklist, so neither of you has to ask the other what is still missing.

What is inside

Open a work and you get four sections. The left-hand side is a directory tree; the right-hand side shows one block at a time — whichever you clicked. Everything inside is laid out field by field rather than as one block of text — the concept, the story, each episode and each panel get their own place, reference sheets are a wall of cards with their portraits, the storyboard is one episode of thumbnails per screen, and finished films play right on the page. The moment you pick a category, what goes in is settled, so the fields you see stay the same from one work to the next.

The directory has two levels, and both live on the left. Click Outline and it opens into concept, story, per-episode outlines, creative rules and open items. Click Reference sheets and it opens into characters, scenes, art style and voices, each with a count beside it. Click Storyboard and it opens into episode 1, episode 2, and so on, each carrying its own coverage (18/20), so you know which episode to go to before you pick one.

The point of this layout is specific: when you are halfway down the right-hand side and want to switch to another block, you do not have to scroll back to the top to reach the tabs. With twenty panels in an episode, that trip back to the top takes a while.

How many you have, and how many are missing, is written right on the directory. A 0 next to Voices means no voice has been settled yet. Empty groups are never hidden — hide them and you would never learn that the block exists.

The address bar holds whichever block you are looking at, in the form #/works/12/storyboard/57. Refreshing does not throw you back to the works list, and the address can be shared or bookmarked — it reopens on the same episode.

Reference sheets matter most. They hold more than a portrait — they hold a written description that pins the character down, and that is what makes the lead in episode seven the same person as in episode one. It is also where AI-generated serial content most often falls apart. Voice sheets work the same way: they record how a character should be read and by how much the pitch and speed are shifted, so episode seven does not suddenly sound like someone else.

One sheet shows one character. If the picture you hand over is a group photo, the assistant crops that one character out before building the sheet rather than using the whole shot — otherwise every panel drawn from it would keep pulling the second person into frame.

The storyboard shows one episode at a time. Twenty or thirty episodes laid out at once is several hundred thumbnails, which nobody can read. Pick an episode on the left and only that episode's thumbnails are drawn. Click a panel and its details open in a dialog — the picture, the lines, what that panel has to get across — with buttons to step to the previous or next one.

"Creative rules" and "Open items" are not a scratchpad. The first holds what you signed off on and nobody may quietly change later ("the monster stands 8 times Mika's height"); the second holds flaws already reported, so they are not investigated again as fresh bugs. Every entry carries a topic and a scope: whether the scope reads "whole work" or "from episode 3 on" matters — across a few dozen episodes, these two blocks are what stops episode 8 from contradicting episode 2.

Telling the assistant which one you mean

Every panel and every sheet carries a short code: EP3-P5 is episode 3, panel 5; SET2-S7 is sticker 7 of pack 2; CHAR-Mika is Mika's character sheet, and VOX-Mika is her voice sheet.

The code is there for you to say out loud. Write "redraw EP3-P5" in a chat and the assistant knows exactly which panel that is — no counting, no miscounting — and it says the code back to you ("I redid episode 3, panel 5 (EP3-P5)"), so the next message still points at the same thing.

If that feels like work, every panel and sheet also has a Ask AI to change this button: it opens a new chat with the code already attached. Plain language still works too — say "the last panel of episode three is off" and the assistant works out which one that is and tells you the code.

One step at a time, and it checks with you

Making an animated comic runs roughly like this:

Talk through the idea → write the outline → build the character and scene sheets → write the storyboard and dialogue → draw the panels → record the voices → assemble the film.

The three bold steps each stop and ask whether you are happy. There is a reason for that order: the earlier a step, the cheaper it is. An outline is a few paragraphs and costs nothing to rewrite ten times. A character sheet is a single image, a few cents. Saying "that is not my lead" after a hundred panels are drawn is the expensive version.

So being picky early pays off more than anywhere else. You do not need any jargon for it — "he does not look right", "this part drags" is enough.

Change one thing without redoing everything

This is the real difference between a work and simply generating it all again.

Say you want the lead's hair colour changed. The assistant first tells you which panels that touches — "6 panels get redrawn, the other 14 stay as they are" — and only redraws those six once you agree. Nothing you already approved gets thrown away.

Revising one episode's plot works the same way: only that episode is affected.

Any chat can pick it up

A work belongs to your account, not to a conversation. Three days later, start a new chat, type @ and pick the work: the assistant reads its material checklist, its reference sheets and the decisions you made before carrying on. You do not have to explain any of it twice.

Dialogue and voices

Dialogue is written during the storyboard step; the voices are recorded after the panels are drawn. That order cannot be swapped — how long a line takes to say is what decides how long its panel stays on screen. Draw first and add lines later and you end up with three seconds of picture against seven seconds of speech, which means redoing the timing.

Dialogue is delivered as voice-over plus subtitles; there are no speech bubbles drawn into the panels. For choosing and adjusting voices, see 14-voice.md.

What you can make today

Three categories: animated comics, AI short dramas and sticker packs.

They share everything that matters — reference sheets, the material checklist, the codes, changing one thing without redoing the rest. They differ only in what the layers are called and what material they need:

All three keep growing. Keep adding episodes to the comic, keep adding packs to the stickers (Lunar New Year, office life), keep adding episodes to the drama — all inside the same work. The character, style and voice sheets travel with the work, so you never end up with a season two whose lead looks — or sounds — like someone else.

Each episode also records what it is about, what it picks up from the one before, and what hook it leaves for the next; you can read all three under Per-episode outlines in the outline. When it comes to episode 8, the assistant works from those three lines instead of asking you to recap the first seven.

This page is about the work container itself. For what an animated comic needs from you, what the finished thing looks like, and how one gets made step by step, see 15-dynamic-comic.md.