pod docs

Series & continuity

Make episode 30 with the exact same faces, places and look as episode 1 — automatically, and cheaper with every episode.

A one-off film is a sprint. A series is a promise: your lead's face in episode 6 has to be the face your audience met in episode 1, the family home can't quietly rearrange itself between cuts, and the whole show has to keep looking like one show. Pod keeps that promise for you with something called series canon — and it has a nice side effect: every episode after the first costs less to make.

Starting a series

You can start a series two ways, and they end up in the same place:

❯ produce "Basti V4 EP 1-30.pdf" --episode 1 --series basti --duration 90 --aspect 9:16 --language telugu
  (a 30-episode screenplay PDF — pod slices out episode 1 and starts the series)

Episode 1 is where the show gets born. You go through the normal gates — script, casting, characters & locations, shots, cost, clips, screening (see the gates) — and every face, place and style choice you approve along the way becomes the series canon. Once episode 1 wraps, the series look is locked: the visual style you signed off on becomes the style of the whole show.

Tip: Take your time at the characters & locations gate of episode 1. "Give Meena a red saree" costs almost nothing to try now — but whatever you approve is the Meena your audience will watch for thirty episodes. Episode 1 is the audition; everything after is the run of the show.

What canon actually is

Canon is the approved truth of your series: the faces of your characters, the look of your locations, and the overall visual style — all set by episode 1. When later episodes need a returning character, pod doesn't generate a new version and hope it looks similar. It reuses the approved reference exactly. Same face, episode 1 through episode 30.

Episode 2 and onward: the continuity review

When you produce a later episode of the series, pod opens with a series continuity review before designing anything. It sorts the cast and locations into two piles — returning and new — and tells you plainly what that means for your wallet:

❯ produce "Basti V4 EP 1-30.pdf" --episode 2 --series basti
returning from your series (same face/place, reused as-is — nothing regenerates, nothing spent): Meena
new this episode: Ravi, Basti Street
Enter = design the new ones · x = stop

Read that first line again, because it's the whole deal: for returning characters, nothing regenerates and nothing is spent. Meena's approved face is carried in as-is. Only Ravi and Basti Street — the genuinely new faces and places — go through design and reference generation. Press Enter (the big key on the right of your keyboard) and pod designs just the new ones.

Standing rules follow the show

When you say "from now on, illustration style" at any gate, that's a standing rule — pod remembers it for the rest of the episode. In series mode, standing rules persist across the whole series: say it once in episode 1 and it still applies in episode 6, without you repeating yourself. (More on scoped versus standing notes in talking about what you want.)

The show bible: pod remembers the story

Faces and places are the visual memory. The show bible is the story memory. When an episode of a series wraps, a dedicated crew member — the series keeper — folds it into the bible: the story so far, how each episode ends, the durable facts about every character (relationships, jobs, secrets, what they know), the rules of your world, the threads left open, and the direction notes you gave along the way.

Before the writer drafts episode 2, it reads the bible. So episode 2 doesn't just look like episode 1 — it remembers that Meena owns the tea shop, that the town is set in 1998, that the letter was never explained, and that you asked for golden-hour exteriors back in episode 1. You'll see a glimpse of it at the continuity review: "show bible · story so far: …".

Note: If you brought your own finished screenplay, your script stays the boss — the bible only rides along as background continuity and never rewrites your words.

Scene geography: rooms that stay put

Faces are only half of continuity. The other half is space — and it's where AI video quietly betrays you: cut from a wide shot to a close-up and suddenly the window is on the other side of the room, or the kitchen has gained a foot of counter.

Pod defends against this with scene geography: it maps what sits where in each scene, so rooms never mirror-flip or reproportion between cuts. And a dedicated crew member — the continuity supervisor — checks every scene and every cut boundary as clips come in. In steer mode the supervisor files advisories and you make the calls; in autopilot it acts on them itself (see the three modes).

Changing a canon face

What if, three episodes in, you decide Meena needs a different look? By design, canon wins — even over new reference images you drop in. To change a canon face, you redo the earlier episode that set it. That episode's approval is what defined the face, so that's where the change has to happen.

Note: This also applies to your own images. If you bring reference photos with --assets and one is mapped to a returning series character, pod won't use it — canon keeps the approved face, and pod tells you so plainly. See using your own media.
Careful: There's no side door for swapping a returning character's face mid-season — that's deliberate. It protects you from the subtle drift that makes episode 12 feel like a recast nobody announced.

Why series get cheaper per episode

Every character or location that returns is design work and reference generation you don't pay for again. Episode 1 carries the full cost of building the world. Episode 2 pays only for what's new — Ravi and a street, not Meena and everything else. By episode 10, most of your cast is returning, most of your world already exists, and each episode's spend is mostly just the footage itself. Consistency and savings come from the same mechanism: reuse. (For how the money side works in general — drafts, masters, the cost gate — see money & credits.)

Where a series lives

Like everything pod makes, your series is saved only on your own computer, inside the episodes folder — each episode in its own folder, with the finished film in 07-final/. Canon lives there too. It's the only copy, so back it up like you'd back up raw footage (see privacy & your files).