The Story Bible says what happens. World & Epoch says what may appear on screen. Ask a model for "a kitchen, 1962" and it will put a mobile phone on the counter often enough that one survives review.
### The period contract
Pick a preset — Victorian, Interwar, Mid-century, Analogue, Contemporary, Near future — and it fills era, years, region, architecture, wardrobe, technology, transport, materials, typography, language and visual references. Edit anything. The field that does the work is Must never appear: a comma-separated list of concrete things not to draw. "Set in 1962" is an instruction a model half-follows; "no mobile phones, no LED lighting" is one it obeys.
Save the period contract and two things happen:
- In every prompt — the contract becomes a PERIOD line and a NOTHING ANACHRONISTIC negative block on every generation in the project. The page shows the exact text.
- Period violations — every shot description is scanned for the excluded terms, with the scene, shot and the sentence that tripped it. This catches a writer typing "she checks her phone" into a 1962 film before the credits are spent.
The scan reads descriptions, so it cannot catch a model adding a phone the description never mentioned; that needs a vision check, and the Film Audit reports it as not run rather than as passed.