The slow part was never making one video. It was making a whole episode without hand-assembling every shot.

The idea

Your tracker already holds the graph: which assets are in which shot, which part of the script makes each beat, the prompt fragments on each asset. That is enough to build the picture, so SignalBox builds it.

What happens

Versions publish into the usual review. A reviewer's note goes to an LLM, which rewrites the beat and returns a wedge of variations to pick from. Revise an upstream asset and everything built from it rebuilds. Nobody opens another application, renders a version, and uploads it back.

Autodesk Flow Production Tracking, still widely called ShotGrid. Notes are interpreted by claude -p. Every generation step is automatic, and every approval is a person's.

For the technically minded

Nothing in there holds state except the tracker. The check in the middle has one arrow out and it is not an approval: it can park work and say why, and the yes always comes from a person. More in Every gate is a person.

Who built it

I am Geoffrey Hancock, a VFX supervisor and producer, with a VES award for Changeling, a VES nomination for Invictus and a Robert nomination for Skammerens Datter II. I directed a team of AI agents to build SignalBox, and the judgment calls are mine. If you are wiring a tracker to real work, I am at geoff@thevfxsupervisor.com.

What this is

A snapshot of a larger internal system, not maintained. One gap worth naming: change a model or a LoRA and nothing yet notices that existing versions used the old one.