Decisions

Somewhere in every project there is a thing you have already worked out. She never lies to her sister. The city is never shown in daylight. It ends without the reunion. You settled it — maybe in your head, maybe in a long argument with yourself at two in the morning — and it is now simply true about your film.

The problem is that nothing else knows. Ask for a new scene and it gets decided again, differently. Ask for shots and the daylight creeps back in. Every request starts from nothing, so the film drifts a little each time.

A decision is how you stop that. It is one settled thing about your story, written down in your project, that Filmara reads before it makes anything for you.

Where they live

Open any lens and look at the left rail: there's a Decisions tab. It's there on every lens, not just the one you're writing in, because a decision isn't a writing thing or a storyboard thing — it governs both.

Inside is the list. Each record shows its number, its one-line title, and how far it reaches.

The number — SDR-0004, SDR-0011 — is the point. It gives a decision a handle, so it can be pointed at. You can say "that contradicts SDR-0004" and mean something exact, and so can Filmara.

Reaching one in Brainstorm

You can write a decision down cold, but most of them arrive at the end of an argument. That's what Brainstorm is for.

Brainstorm is the one mode where Filmara refuses to write anything. It won't draft the scene, it won't hand you dialogue, it won't dramatize the idea you just described. It asks you one question at a time, and — this is the part people don't expect — it tells you what it thinks and why, in a line. It's a story editor, not a survey.

It also pushes back. Say "she's conflicted" and it will ask conflicted between what and what — pinning the vague thing to something you could actually put on screen. Say something that clashes with what your project already establishes, and it will name the clash and ask which one wins.

A session that settles nothing is a fine session. But when you get somewhere, say so:

"Record that." "Lock that in." "Write that as a decision."

The decision appears in the panel. Filmara won't record one on its own — it waits to be told, because a thought you're still turning over is not a decision yet.

Writing one yourself

New decision in the panel gives you three things:

Field	What goes in it
Scope	How far the decision reaches — Story, Character, or Beat
Title	The decision, in a line. This is what you'll read in the list.
Decision	The full statement. Say the whole thing.

Write the statement as something true about the film, not as a note to yourself. "The city is never shown in daylight" is a decision. "Think about the daylight thing" is a reminder, and it will make everything downstream worse, because Filmara will try to conform to it.

How far a decision reaches

Scope is reach — how much of the film a decision governs. It isn't a category for what the decision is about.

• Story — the default, and most of them. The premise, the tone, a rule about the world, how it ends.
• Character — a rule that belongs to one person. Pick who, from your cast; the decision then travels with them.
• Beat — a decision about one moment in your structure.

There is deliberately no scene scope. A scene isn't something you decide — it's something that comes out of your decisions. If you find yourself wanting to pin a decision to a scene, the decision is usually about a character or the story, and the scene is just where you noticed it.

What Filmara does with them

Before Filmara makes anything for you — a scene, a character, a set of shots — it reads your settled decisions along with your brief and your script. Two things follow from that:

• It conforms. The new scene is written by someone who already knows she never lies to her sister.
• It flags a contradiction rather than silently resolving it. If what you've asked for can't be done without breaking a decision, it says so and names the record, so you can decide which one gives.

This is also why decisions are worth writing early. Everything made after a decision is made in light of it; everything made before it isn't.

Changing your mind

You will. Decisions are not permanent, but they're not editable either — you supersede one instead. The old record stays, marked as superseded, and the new one takes over.

That's on purpose. The record of what you used to believe about your film is worth keeping: it explains why the middle of your second act looks the way it does. Editing the old decision in place would erase the reason.

Sending a decision home

Some decisions belong somewhere more specific than a list. When you record one about a character, the panel offers to add it to that character's backstory — one tap, appended to the character's own page, so it's there when you're reading about them rather than only when you're reading the decisions. (Desktop app.)

Some decisions also imply work. Settle something about a character and Filmara can spin up a draft task for the work that follows from it — sitting in your Tasks panel until you decide to run it. Nothing happens without you starting it.

Worth knowing

• A decision guides, it doesn't rewrite. Recording that the city is never shown in daylight will not go back and change the scenes you've already written. It governs what gets made next.
• Recording is explicit. In Brainstorm, Filmara only records when you ask it to. Nothing gets filed behind your back.
• A character decision needs its character. If Filmara can't work out who a decision is about, the record will ask you to say — pick from your cast and it files itself.

Where to go next

• How the chat works — what Filmara can see on any given turn, and where the other stop points are.
• Working with the AI — the actual asks, now that your decisions are guiding them.