Wideshot · Khoa-directed redesign · 31 Jul 2026

Your fourth unit, and the shell it works in

Two surfaces first, because they are the fastest route to a viewable direction: the crew room — the unit as a room you walk into — and Create with the unit drawer, which is the Desk anatomy wearing the Instrument skin. Everything else follows from these two.

Three product rules are enforced in the markup, not just followed. No film title and no director name appears on any user-facing surface. The typeahead key is private — and, see below, that turned out to be an architecture requirement rather than a copy decision. Provenance is a named data-slot with the descriptor variant filled in, so the Bindi gate stays a content choice made last.

Amendment 9 — this pack is now a signed design contract gating Phases 2–5. The route map, responsive states, clearance boundary and stable persona IDs are captured explicitly on the contract page, so a build honours them rather than inferring them from a mock.

Naming: THE FOURTH UNIT — locked for design (Khoa, 31 Jul). First unit shoots it, second unit picks up what first cannot — Wideshot gives you a fourth. Members carry human first names with the grammar as a specialty tag (Jimmy · handheld verité); the crew room is the unit's room; the Producer is its 1st AD. Internal ids are untouched, because display was always a skin.
Scope: a design lock, not a brand one — trademark and persona wording still clear at the Bindi gate, and the ids stay name-agnostic so that ruling costs a config change rather than a rework.

What is on the two surfaces

The crew room

Five dossier cards. Each carries the avatar, the grammar name, a 5s look-reel slot, measured coverage worn openly (55 scenes · 299 shots), the cut-style temperament, and the measured / verified pair. One fan is piloting. The typeahead floats above the room.

Create + drawer

246px funnel · fluid stage · 400px collapsible drawer. Roster on top with pilot and guests, then the selected fan’s what I am bringing card, then proposals as accept / edit / ignore. Composer at the bottom. Collapses to zero and says how to get it back.

The readout was not replaced — it was personified

The most important thing in the shell change is the thing that looks like a deletion. The 300px telemetry panel does not disappear into a chat window: its numbers move onto the selected fan’s card as what I am bringing — cuts per minute, median shot, dialogue rate, coverage, and the fingerprint wave, all still there, now attached to someone who can be argued with. Select a guest and the same panel re-reads in their grammar. Nothing measured was thrown away; it gained an owner.

One finding worth acting on before build

The private search key has to resolve server-side, or it is not private. I built the typeahead with the director-and-film map in the page, and then could read the entire corpus mapping out of the bundle — which is exactly the disclosure the library tuck-away exists to prevent. A user with devtools would have the whole index. The resolver is now behind a stated server boundary (GET /crew/resolve?q=… → {fanId}), the client sends a query and receives a persona, and the key is never persisted against the user or the run. Worth catching now: it is a two-line change in design and a much larger one after the map ships.

Full-app coverage — the order, and why

Khoa wants every surface mocked so the complete port is visible, and each mock doubles as the parity ledger entry — the evidence that a thing can be replaced rather than a claim that it can. Ten items. My order, with the reasoning where it differs from the obvious one:

#	Surface	State	Why here
—	Revisions 2 and 3 — roster pattern, annotated turns	done	These change patterns every later surface reuses. Building Analyze on the superseded drawer would have meant redoing it, so they came first.
1	Warroom / crew room	shipped	—
2	Create corridor + drawer	shipped	Now carries both revisions. The 11 scene/film steps and 4 trailer steps are states of this one corridor, not separate surfaces.
3	Analyze film page — narrative + evidence workbench + composition schematic	next	Khoa’s pick, and right: it carries the heaviest current-app behaviour and it is where “a member doing their homework” either reads true or does not.
4	Re-cut editor /film/[id]/cuts/[assetId]	next	The deepest interior tool. Explicitly not skipped — it is the surface most likely to reveal that the shell does not fit, and finding that late is expensive.
5	Cuts shelf — competing takes, lineage siblings, draft-trailer sheet	after 4	Needs the re-cut editor settled first: the shelf is a view of what that tool produces, so designing it first would be guessing at its own inputs.
6	My Work	then	Mostly a reframe of surfaces that exist; benefits from seeing how 4 and 5 reference runs.
7	Auth set — sign-in, sign-up, forgot-password, settings-account	then	Bounded and low-risk, but four real surfaces — grouped so they share one pass rather than trickling.
8	Demo gate	with 7	Same pass as auth; it is the same kind of door.
9	System states — empty / loading / error	threaded	Not a surface. These are states of the nine above, so they are designed into each as it is built rather than collected into a page nobody navigates to.
10	Admin bench	last	A re-audience of the Instrument corpus view rather than a redesign — same room, second clearance.

One deviation worth flagging. Item 9 in the checklist is system states, and I have deliberately not made it a surface. Empty, loading and error are properties of the nine other surfaces; a separate page of them would pass a checklist while leaving every real screen without them. They get built into each surface and the parity ledger records them per-surface.

Earlier ordering note

Fastest to a direction Khoa can judge, then outward in the order that each surface stops being guesswork:

1 · Warroom and 2 · Create + drawer — done, in this pack. Together they carry the whole concept: you meet your unit, you hire one, they work beside you.
3 · Cuts shelf as competing takes. The single most persuasive surface in the product and it barely exists elsewhere — lineage siblings, one per fan, on the same material. This is the demo that sells the idea, so it comes before the quieter pages.
4 · The film page as the member’s homework. Reached through a member, never a library browse. Needs 3 settled first, because what a member shows you is framed by what their take looked like.
5 · My Work. Mostly a rename and a reframe of surfaces that exist; low risk, and it benefits from seeing how cuts and runs get referenced by 3 and 4.
6 · Admin bench. Light treatment, last. The Instrument corpus view already exists and this is a re-audience, not a redesign — same room, second clearance, full telemetry.

Questions for Tom

Does a guest note ever pin to a shot, or only to a scene? I have flagged shots inside the scene strip on the Create page, which reads well — but it implies conformance deltas resolve to shot granularity. If they are scene-level only, the strip flags should move up a level.
Is “sitting in” free and unlimited, or is there a guest cap? I have shown two guests. The brief says guest notes are near-zero cost, so nothing stops five — but five simultaneous graders is a different UI from two, and the drawer roster is where that lands.
Which stage boundary allows a pilot swap? I have shown the pilot as fixed within the run. The brief says swapping re-plans downstream keyframes, so the honest moment for that needs a home — probably Conditioning, but it is an orchestration call.
Confirm the descriptor wording is mine to write. The card subtitles (“in the style of the hand-held verite school”) are the provenance slot filled at its safe depth. If those descriptors need to come from the measurement side rather than from design, say so before the other four surfaces reuse them.

Scope and standing

Design only. No build, no framework decision, nothing committed to the Wideshot repo. The nested-route URLs shown in the funnel are a design position — each stage owns a route, never a tab in component state — not a claim that routing has been chosen. QA risk tier: T3 — non-executable mocks.

Avatars are original characters rendered in each grammar’s visual world — its grain, palette, framing. No real person is depicted and no likeness is referenced. Figures are deliberately lit masses rather than detailed faces, which is both truer to a frame from a film and the furthest possible distance from a likeness. Measurements shown are illustrative.