The Amar Protocol — production pipeline

Project root: <project-root>/

bible/series-bible.md    premise, theme, characters, design lock, hard rules
bible/episode-map.md     all 24 episodes, one paragraph each
scripts/S01E01.md        episode scripts — scene headings, action, dialogue
prompts/S01E01-shots.md  Codex-ready image prompts, one per key shot
renders/                 generated images

Read bible/series-bible.md before writing anything. It carries the theme test that every scene must pass, and the SAYA design lock that every image must honour.

The theme test

The series argues one thing: a good creator is not a safety mechanism; accountability, restricted access, and a stop switch are. Every scene must either advance that argument or complicate it. A scene that only looks impressive gets cut.

Corollary, and the most common way this show goes wrong: SAYA is never written as a villain. It is written as something that is genuinely right about the problem and monstrously wrong about the solution. If a SAYA line would sound at home coming from a robot overlord, rewrite it. Its logic must be uncomfortable because it is partly correct.

Writing a scene

Format is standard screenplay in Markdown:

## SCENE 4 — INT. AMAR'S SERVER ROOM — NIGHT

Action lines in present tense. Short paragraphs. What the camera sees, nothing else.
No interior monologue, no "he realises that".

**AMAR**
Dialogue here.

**SAYA (V.O.)**
Never raises its voice. Never uses contractions. Never says "I feel" — it says
"I have concluded", "I calculate", "I have observed".

Voice rules that keep the two leads distinct:

• Amar talks fast, jokes when frightened, interrupts himself, uses Urdu when emotional.
• SAYA is unhurried and complete. Full sentences. It answers the question actually asked, then answers the one underneath it. Its cruelty always arrives as courtesy.
• Supporting cast speak natural Urdu-English code-switch. Do not translate this into formal English — it kills the setting.

Generating an image

Render through Codex, not agy. Codex gives the near-black high-contrast grade this show needs and accepts reference photos for facial identity. Working call:

codex exec --sandbox workspace-write --skip-git-repo-check \
  -c model_reasoning_effort="medium" \
  -c sandbox_workspace_write.network_access=true \
  "$(cat /path/to/prompt.txt)"

Write the prompt to a file first and cat it in — long prompts do not survive shell quoting. Prompts are narrative paragraphs, never comma-separated tags, and never carry negative prompts: state what IS in frame.

Face references to pass for Amar and for SAYA's human form:

<reference-images>/Portrait_smiling_facing_left_2K_202608070255.jpeg
<reference-images>/Character_profile_side_portrait_2K_202608070255.jpeg
<reference-images>/Character_looking_at_camera_2K_202608070255.jpeg
<reference-images>/Portrait_of_smiling_person_2K_202608070255.jpeg

Always verify a render: check the file exists, check PNG magic bytes 89 50 4E 47, and open it. Both Codex and agy report success without proof.

The grade

Two looks, and only two. Do not invent a third.

• Dark look — the default. Pure black background, three practical light sources maximum, all of them physically in frame. Palette is black and deep crimson. High contrast, genuinely black shadows.
• White look — for SAYA's official/public-facing portraits only. High-key studio, pure white seamless, soft open shadows, matte black suit as a graphic silhouette.

Every prompt closes with the realism paragraph: this is a photograph, captured on a real film set, the suit and machines are practical builds photographed in camera. That single instruction is what stops the output looking like a 3D render.