A production system for narrated video
Production with the
evidence attached.
Throughline carries a subject from research to a finished cut as one connected record, with every claim tied to the source it came from. Model calls run on your own provider accounts, billed to you at their price.
7 days for $1, then $19 a month for the workspace. Model usage is billed by your provider, separately.
Every claim on this page carries a note saying where to check it, including the ones that cannot be verified, and the one that is not built yet.
Today
The work is the retyping.
A doc. A chat window. A spreadsheet. A notes app. Every handoff loses a source or contradicts the last one.
Here
One project. No handoffs.
The brief drives the script. The script drives the frames. Each stage reads what the last one wrote.
Output
Five things, per project.
Files and words you can drop straight into an edit, the day you make them.
A researched brief
The angle, who it is for, and what the video must not claim.
A script in parts
Written part by part, each one reading what the last one wrote.
A voiceover
Recorded from your own account, silence trimmed, levelled for YouTube.
Timed frames
A picture for every beat, cut on the voiceover’s real timings.
Titles and a thumbnail brief
Scored for pull and for whether the script delivers it.
Provenance
Every fact can show where it came from.
The ones that can’t, say so.
Two lines from the same script. One of them runs out of road.
The first line is fine: the fact inside it came from somewhere real, so the video can say it. The second line sounds true and nothing backs it up, so it turns amber and tells you now, instead of a stranger telling you in the comments.
This stage is what the rest of the system is built around. Every other decision in the product (one project, no handoffs, nothing overwritten) exists to keep it true.
Walkthrough
One project, six views.
“How did humans invent countries?” : the same record, all the way down.
Idea
Angles, and which ones are earned
The border that exists because two surveyors disagreed by four miles
Why the map you learned had a different number of countries
What has to be true before a place counts as a country
The third is marked a guess, because nothing was measured for that framing. The product will not let an inference wear a measurement’s clothes.
Research
Judged against its own channel
- The country that only existed for 3 days
- Why Africa’s borders are straight lines
- Every country that disappeared
The bottom row has more subscribers than the other two together and is not an outlier. It is an ordinary video from a big channel. Sorting by views would have put it first and taught you the wrong lesson.
Evidence
One of these is not supported
Every competitor opens on the treaty and none of them mentions who was in the room.
“I still don’t understand why the borders look like that” · 412 upvotes
UN membership went from 51 states in 1945 to 193 today.
Most modern borders were drawn by people who had never seen the land.
The last one is the point. It sounds true, it is exactly the sentence a script reaches for, and nothing you gathered supports it, so the writer is told to say it modestly or not at all, and the script analysis names it if you assert it anyway.
Script
What loses people
You open a question and never answer it
“Who decided the first border, and did anyone agree?” , opened at “nobody signed anything”.
310 words with nothing happening
Four long sentences in a row. Fix: Break the middle one and let the date land alone.
Spelling and reading level are hygiene. These are the two that decide whether anybody is still watching at four minutes.
Frames
Measured, never guessed
- You have seen this map your whole life.
- Nobody signed anything to make it look like that.
- The lines came from arguments, accidents and surveyors.
Those times come from the voiceover’s own alignment. The product had a words-per-minute version and deleted it, rather than keep two timelines that look identical on screen and disagree.
Packaging
The promise, and the payoff
- How did humans invent countries?
- The map you learned was wrong
- Countries are a 400-year-old idea
The middle title pulls hardest and scores worst, because the script does not deliver what it promises. Every clickbait tool optimises the first number. The gap between them is the one that costs you a channel.
Voice
Your read, minus the dead air.
The gaps come out
Dead air is where people leave. Cutting it by hand is the dull hour after the recording, and this is the same job, done on the whole part at once.
Levelled to −14 LUFS
What YouTube plays everything at. Quieter than that and your video sounds thin against the one before it, which viewers hear as amateur without knowing why.
Try a voice on a sentence, not a chapter
Comparing voices used to cost a whole part per try. Nobody compares carefully at that price, so they keep the first one that sounds acceptable.
Frames
Every beat gets a picture.
Timed to the read, not to a guess
Every frame starts and ends on the recording’s own timings, so a picture never lands a beat after the line it belongs to.
One video, not forty pictures
Each image is drawn with no memory of the last. A style lock goes out with every prompt, and it is the only thing making frame 4 and frame 40 belong together.
Graded before you spend on it
The plan is graded against the rules your project wrote for itself: forbidden motifs, things it must never imply, while a frame is still a sentence and costs nothing to fix.
Model accounts
Throughline does not sell you a model.
No models of its own, and nothing resold. Your accounts, your provider’s price, and nothing added on the way out.
- Research a topic
- Check it against the world
- Write the script
- Draw the frames
- Read it out loud
- Make frames move
One account often covers two rows: OpenAI writes and draws, and so does Google AI Studio, which is the only one here that issues a key without a card. Most people connect two or three things and are done. Moving frames is listed because it is priced and chosen like the rest, and marked because it does not run yet.
How your keys are held
- Encrypted with AES-256-GCM before storage, under a key that lives in the hosting environment and not in the database.
- Never sent to the browser. No screen and no action returns one. You see a masked hint and whether it last worked.
- Never in an export. The content export drops the credentials table by name, and a test fails if a key appears in its output.
- Deleted when you delete them, from the row rather than from a flag.
What it costs
$1for 7 days
then $19 a month
No seats to count, no credits to top up, nothing to upgrade to. Cancel it yourself, any day.
The workspace
$19 a month
The AI
Whatever your provider charges you
- Unlimited projects and brands
- Every stage: research, script, voice, frames, packaging
- Full version history, so nothing overwrites your work
- Export to Premiere: timeline, markers, captions and every drawn frame
- 10 GB of storage, one seat
The receipts
Every claim here, and where to check it.
Some of these can be checked in the repository. Some cannot, and those say so rather than going quiet. A page where every line checks out is a longer way of saying trust me.
checked
Keys are encrypted before storage, and never reach the browser.
checked
Nothing is added to what your AI produces.
not verified
What your AI provider puts inside its own files.
Run one project through it.
The only test that counts. If it is not better than what you make now, do not pay for the second month.
Questions? Get in touch.