This is not a market-research deck. It is a library of 28 workflow-grounded personas and 14 strategic typologies written against the engine's real surface area — named routes, named presets, named transitions, named limits. For a project planner, it is a constraint map disguised as a cast list.
01 — Orientation
Before you plan against this, know which layer you are reading. They are built with different intents, and conflating them is the fastest way to misuse the set.
Real workflows against real surfaces. Each names the routes, presets, transitions and capabilities they actually touch — /engine, /versions/film.html, kraft, whip-blur, BPM detection, the 12-bin chromagram, MediaRecorder WebM export, magic-link login.
Grouped as 10 per-surface · 5 cross-cutting · 13 domain.
Roles the engine's creator thinks with, not users to market to. Every section is reframed around how the typology would push his own work forward. No "what they would click."
Four modes: Auditor · Practitioner · Broker · Cross.
A granular end-user library (buskers, beatmakers, real-estate agents, AR business-card designers) started and cancelled at the creator's request. Kept on disk under marketing/personas/abandoned/ as a record — explicitly not part of the deliverable.
Do not plan against this layer.
02 — The surface area
This is the spine of the library. A planner should read the surface, not the persona, first — the surface tells you what breaks and who notices. Click any card to filter the persona index below.
● Storyboard engine (SB) is planned — seven personas design against it anyway, which is a signal worth carrying into planning.
03 — Anatomy
Every workflow persona uses the same template. Learn it once and you can scan all 28 in minutes — the useful fields are "a typical session" and "what would make them leave."
04 — Coverage
Count of the 28 workflow personas touching each surface. For a planner this is a blast-radius map: change the top two surfaces and you have changed the library.
Presets (22) and the recorder (20) are the most-touched surfaces — and the two with the cleanest mental models (an anchor map, a WebM file). The engine core sits just behind at 20: connective tissue almost every workflow passes through, rarely anyone's primary surface.
Projects/auth is touched by only 6 personas — the smallest set, with the strongest signal: every one of them trusts the magic-link login specifically, and none would accept OAuth as a substitute.
The 14-FX pipeline is touched by 10 personas — and in 7 of those, chroma is the exact uniform they push. It is the single most-named specific feature in the whole library.
05 — Index
Filter by surface or search by name and one-line. Start from the surface you are about to change.
06 — Signals
Both READMEs close with a "what we noticed" pass. These are the findings a planner should treat as constraints.
Of the 7 storyboard personas, only 4 also touch the recorder. The other 3 treat the storyboard as a planning artifact, not a render target. Storyboard-first users are not recorder-first users.
All 9 transition users fire them manually, on phrase boundaries. Every one of them would leave if the engine started auto-firing on every bar.
Take-home loops (curator, therapist) vs. merch-table posters (touring visualist, poster maker). Both insist on no-login share links. The 5-second record limit is a shared tolerance, not a complaint.
Audio analysis is overwhelmingly used as a sanity check on the 12-bin chromagram, not the BPM. Two personas use it as a primary surface; the other eight use it to validate another surface's claim.
Six of the 14 library users re-tag assets or constrain the ShotPicker to a tag bucket. Nobody's problem is browsing.
Three personas explicitly capture multiple takes and pick the best. They would leave if the engine started auto-picking a single take.
Three personas flatly refuse any "smart" auto-correction or "trust the AI" pass. The engine's refusal to smooth the surface is a feature for them, not a limitation.
The designer, the philosopher and the multisystem specialist leave the moment the engine starts hiding its seams — a real constraint on any redesign that smooths the surface.
Five typologies (meditator, author, music tutor, musician, writer) have zero tolerance for popups, notifications, nudges, streaks or share-prompts. The largest single signal about who not to please.
07 — Playbook
Write the spec against ENG, VER, FX, TX, AR, SB, REC, PST, AAP, LIB or AUD. If a feature does not land on a surface, no persona in this library can validate it.
Use the coverage matrix as the invite list. Changing presets means 22 stakeholders. Changing auth means 6 — but all six are immovable on the mechanism.
"A typical session" tells you where the workflow breaks today — usually the almost quit line. That is your real acceptance test, and it is usually not a crash.
These are non-negotiables, not preferences. Write them as regression tests.
Each line is a documented abandonment condition from the files.
The AR loop (8 personas) fails the moment viewing requires a login. The link must open for someone with no account — that is the entire point of sending it.
All 6 projects/auth personas would leave. Venue laptops, hospital firewalls and agency procurement do not support it.
26+ visual styles stay peers. A "theme picker" dropdown or a single mood dropdown drops the variant collector, the touring visualist, the anchor curator and the live VJ.
The silence between transitions is the work. Auto-firing on every bar costs you all 9 transition users.
A "trust the AI" button, or an auto-correction that snaps a detected key to a diatonic default, removes the override workflow that is the whole reason these people came.
The recorder's MediaRecorder → WebM path is the assumption under every downstream ffmpeg, Vimeo, SoundCloud and archive pipeline in the library.
The largest single signal in the strategic set: five typologies have zero tolerance for nudges or share-prompts.
The chromagram is treated as ground truth; a model guessing tags from clip content would be wrong ~20% of the time and cost you the tag janitor.
"Use a mobile device for live AR" is read as honest, not broken. It is a tolerated limitation forever — do not "fix" it into a login or a desktop fallback.
Open question the directory raises
"What is the engine refusing to do, and is the refusal deliberate?"
The strategic README flags this as the most actionable item in the set: the typologies converge on it, and no public answer exists. For a planner, it is the question that determines whether the next release is a design decision or a surrender.