The pipeline
A reel is one run through a five-node LangGraph graph in src/agents/director.ts. The nodes share one state object, write an AgentLog row when they start and finish, and emit SSE events so the dashboard can follow along.
Director
Reads the prompt and loads the channel, its characters and its world. It researches the topic with Gemini so the script has current context. Every text call goes through invokeWithFallback(), which calls Gemini 2.5 Pro and asks for JSON back.
Screenwriter
Writes the script as JSON: a title, a hook, a list of scenes with visual prompts, emotional tags, a target length, an audio style and the voiceover text. A second call writes platform metadata (title, description, tags, category and audience age). Both are saved on the reel.
Artist
Generates one image per scene with Stability AI in the chosen style, plus a thumbnail from the first scene's prompt. A scene that fails gets a placeholder so the run can continue.
Animator
Sends the scene images to Seedance 2.0 with up to 12 character reference images attached, so recurring characters keep their look. If Seedance is not configured or fails, Kling is tried. With no video key, the stage is skipped.
Producer
Runs three FFmpeg passes:
- Merge the clips with the ElevenLabs voiceover into an H.264 and AAC MP4.
- Write provenance tags into the container:
comment=AI-generated content (created with Kalki)andencoder=Kalki. - Cut a thumbnail from the first second.
The reel then moves to READY with its video path, thumbnail and metadata.
Statuses
PENDING, then SCRIPTING, GENERATING_IMAGES, ANIMATING, POST_PRODUCTION and finally READY. Any stage can end the run as FAILED, with the error kept in pipelineState.