curious-refuge-caleb-ward-ai-film-pre-production

name	Curious Refuge (Caleb Ward): AI Film Pre-Production
description	The pre-production layer of AI filmmaking — reference-asset architecture, the shot-list floor, board-to-plate channel assignment, prompted coverage, voice casting and the ADR seam where AI hands off to a human
version	1.0
format	completion-engine
workflows	3

Curious Refuge (Caleb Ward): AI Film Pre-Production

Caleb Ward — co-founder (with Shelby Ward) and CEO of Curious Refuge, an AI filmmaking school and a Promise company (the same Promise where Dave Clark is CCO). Courses: AI Filmmaking, AI Advertising, Advanced AI Filmmaking 2.0, AI Animation 2.0, AI Documentary, AI VFX, AI Screenwriting. Extracted from four videos, all 2026, all watched in full. Credential ledger with verification status: references/source-notes.md.

What he adds that nobody else in the house does: the files that have to exist before you generate. Everyone else teaches the prompt or the look. Ward teaches the reference-asset architecture — character sheets, location angle banks, style anchors, voice beds — and the order of operations that makes shot 7 belong in the same film as shot 1.

The one-line thesis

"If you just rely to going to the AI video tools alone, you're going to see that there's just some severe lapses in continuity." — [FILM26] 08:22

Continuity is a planning artifact, not a model capability. When a shot comes back wrong, you change the reference assignment — not the adjectives.

The core claim

A pre-production package is not a mood board. It is a set of reusable identity assets built once at high quality and referenced into every generation, plus a shot list saying which asset goes where. Reference assets get maximum quality because their cost amortises across the whole film; shot plates get only what the next step consumes. Generation is the last step and the cheapest to redo.

Available Workflows

#	Workflow	Produces	Use When
01	Pre-Production Package	Story spine + tension shape + shot list + reference-asset manifest + generation budget	Starting any narrative AI piece longer than a clip, or you have to quote a cost before you start
02	Storyboard → Plate → Coverage Chain	Shot conversion sheet: board-or-brief call, three-channel reference assignment, CCR direction, specify-vs-cover, chain plan, accept/salvage criteria	The shot list exists and it's time to generate — or generations keep coming back "wrong" and nobody can say which part
03	Voice & Performance Direction	Voice-bed casting, per-line director's notes, consistency rung per character, stem handoff, the ADR seam	Anyone speaks; the same character sounds like a different person shot to shot; deciding whether to hire voice actors

Quick Reference

• Genius Context: genius.md — load before any workflow. 28 patterns, 10 signature moves, a 15-row quality rubric assembled entirely from his own dated on-camera verdicts, and the voice profile.
• Source notes & fidelity ledger: references/source-notes.md — every source dated, every self-reported credential flagged, and an explicit list of what this corpus does not carry.

Doctrine: tool-independence

The core method names files, channels, rungs and seams — never products. It survives the next model release because none of it is about a model. Every tool name, model version, price, resolution and button path from the four 2026 sources is quarantined in references/era-bound-mechanics.md — "verify before use." No workflow and no execution prompt depends on a line of it. That appendix is unusually large here precisely because the corpus is unusually current: this material will rot fast at the tool layer and not at all at the discipline layer.

The load-bearing decisions

1. The shot list is the floor; the storyboard is optional. "You need to at the very least have a shot list, if not a storyboard." [FILM26] 08:13
2. The composition question — board the shot when composition is load-bearing, brief it when only the idea of the shot matters: "it was the idea of the shot and not the individual composition being exactly right." [ANIME26] 15:47
3. Rough on purpose — the sketch protects your own decision-space: "your brain doesn't get so locked in on some of the supporting details." [FILM26] 09:04
4. Three channels, three references — "use the composition from image number one… and keep the character as at character number one." [FILM26] 11:40. Unassigned channel = unauthorised drift.
5. One identity per character sheet — two characters on one sheet "would be very confusing." [ANIME26] 07:16
6. Locations get two angles, built before you need them. [ANIME26] 08:40
7. Never judge a prompt on one output — "the actual problem is just you didn't generate enough images." [FILM26] 07:44
8. Salvage before you reject — half a second counts. [ANIME26] 13:03 · [FILM26] 15:44
9. Easiest shot first — it becomes the reference anchor. [ANIME26] 09:21
10. Voice last, ADR inverted — the AI authors the timing, the human matches it. [ANIME26] 09:02
11. Budget in generations — iterations × unit cost × runtime. "This is not a free creative medium." [ANIME26] 12:14
12. IP hygiene at the moodboard, where it's free. [FILM26] 03:06

Signature moves (short list)

Four-panel dynamic character sheet · channel-assignment prompt · location angle bank · CCR ordering (camera, character, rig) · the 15-second voice bed cast with emotional range · the rolling reference cut · the parallel model bake-off · board above / plates below · easiest shot first · the salvage pass.

Routing

• Anything before generation starts on a narrative piece → workflow 01
• Turning a shot list into generations; diagnosing "which part is wrong" → workflow 02
• Dialogue, VO, voice drift, hiring voice actors → workflow 03
• Judging a batch that already came back → references/prompts-v2/continuity-audit.md
• Why the finished piece reads flat; look cards, cadence, grade, provenance, release QC → NOT this skill. skills/dave-clark/ — same building, the layer above. When they disagree: Clark owns the look and the cut; Ward owns the asset architecture and the order of operations. Clark says board the shot; Ward says board it only when composition is load-bearing — settle it per shot with the composition question.
• Ad-shaped / platform-optimised AI video → skills/pj-accetturo-ai-video/
• Still-image art direction, style handles, prompt syntax → skills/nick-st-pierre/, skills/rory-flynn/, /art-direct. Ward consumes their output as his style anchor and character sheet; he does not teach that layer.

Execution Prompts (structure-pure v2)

4 deterministic practitioner prompts — each carries an Output Contract, Output Skeleton, and Quality Gate. When a deliverable matches one, Read it and honor its contract instead of improvising the output shape.

• Curious Refuge (Caleb Ward) — Continuity & Consistency Audit — skills/curious-refuge/references/prompts-v2/continuity-audit.md
• Curious Refuge (Caleb Ward) — Pre-Production Package — skills/curious-refuge/references/prompts-v2/preproduction-package.md
• Curious Refuge (Caleb Ward) — Shot Conversion Sheet — skills/curious-refuge/references/prompts-v2/shot-conversion-sheet.md
• Curious Refuge (Caleb Ward) — Voice & Performance Direction Plan — skills/curious-refuge/references/prompts-v2/voice-performance-plan.md

Fidelity note

Three workflows and four prompts, not eight. The master-hunt brief proposed a pitch-trailer workflow; no 2025–26 source in this corpus teaches pitch-trailer structure, and the one trailer-build video on the channel predates the multi-shot-coverage shift that [ANIME26] documents — so building it would have imported era-bound mechanics into the core. It was dropped and replaced by voice & performance direction, which is the densest verified material in the corpus. "Hybrid AI + live pipelines" is built only to the extent the corpus carries it: the ADR seam and the finishing handoff, not live-action plate photography. Ward's press credentials (100M+ views, NYT/Forbes/Hollywood Reporter/CNBC/USA Today, Netflix/Adobe/Sony collaborations) are self-reported on his own site and not independently confirmed — they appear in no prompt's Role & Activation. Full ledger: references/source-notes.md.