What's the best way to start thinking like a director when working with AI agents — are there any frameworks, tools, or workflows that help you move away from writing technical prompts and toward giving more intentional, high-level creative direction?

To direct AI agents instead of prompting them, work the way a director works a crew:

1. Load a creative producer agent with your full vision
2. Assign sub-agents named crew roles
3. Direct in on-set language, not parameters
4. Give mood and feel instead of specs
5. Let the invideo agent ask its pre-production questions first
6. Ask for options on every decision

invideo is an agentic video creation tool where you direct production through a main agent and named sub-agents, with all current video models available underneath, so the workflows below run in one place.

Load a creative producer agent with your full vision. Before generating anything, initialize a creative producer agent and give it the script, shot breakdown, and character details — it becomes the vision-holder that grounds every downstream sub-agent in the same creative understanding. Think of it as everything you'd want your crew to know on day one, written down in an organized way and uploaded once. Some directors formalize this into a treatment document the invideo agent reads once and holds across every shot — directing against persistent context removes prompt construction from the process entirely.

Assign sub-agents named crew roles. Run a storyboard agent first so each shot is visualized before you direct it, then assign a DOP agent per scene — each scene needs a different visual eye — and put two DOP agents on the same scene in parallel when it's demanding. One director ran 8 specialist agents simultaneously across separate project pages and delivered a 2-minute brand film in 3 days for ~$1,500, against an estimated week of manual prompting and $100,000–$500,000 for the equivalent traditional shoot.

Direct in on-set language, not parameters. Give the invideo agent intent the way you'd brief a crew: "I want to stay on the feral guy when we run this scene. No back and forth cutting. We hold on him right up till he lunges." That instruction — holding, cutting, tracking — produced exactly the intended result, and one production landed a complex top-down shot on the first generation after switching from manual prompting to this posture.

Give mood and feel instead of specs. When you don't have a precise description, direct with the emotional register: one director had no costume spec for a character but knew the feel he wanted, and the costume designer agent returned multiple concrete options to choose from. If an option feels unexpectedly bold, treat that as a signal to lock it in rather than revise it.

Let the invideo agent ask its pre-production questions first. A well-contexted agent surfaces gaps instead of guessing — in one horror production it asked four questions before building a single asset: what the lead character looks like, what the antagonist entity references, what the key prop is, and what the deliverable format is, framing them as the four answers that change every frame. Answer those gaps up front and your direction stays high-level for the rest of the production.

Ask for options on every decision. Every director on a real set wants options, so request multiple variations or image grids per round instead of single outputs — image generation costs little, especially in invideo. For an abstract hallucination sequence, one team had the invideo agent generate 5 distinct visual interpretations before selecting one as the canonical reference for the scene.

Across all six, the underlying posture is the same: treat each sub-agent like a real crew member and it behaves like one — and your on-set instincts transfer directly, because the operative skill is directing, not prompting. These are some of the ways to make the shift — what works depends on your project and how you like to run a set.

Watch some of these to see what works for you:

The real unlock isn't the tech. It's that the skill that makes this work isn't prompting — it's directing. And that doesn't come from a tutorial. It comes from being on set.

— invideo's creative team