The camera of 1948 with none of the wear of 1948 — plus every character, location, prop and vehicle that has to be locked before a single final frame gets made.
Kodachrome, ASA 10. Period colour science, modern cleanliness.
The era read comes only from emulsion response and lens behaviour — never from wear. No scratches, no dust, no hairs, no gate weave, no splices, no edge code. If a shot looks like found footage, it is wrong. It should look like a Kodachrome transparency that sat in a dark drawer since 1948 and was scanned yesterday.
The storyboard deliberately skipped this — you cannot judge a lock before you have read the story. Now it matters: every one of the 133 shots will reference a sheet made here, so the disc stops drifting between shots and the faces stay the same people.
Same framework as Morphologies of a Non-Human: a build script turns the plan into a batch JSON, a runner drives ComfyUI from it, every asset lands on a canonical name, and After Effects is assembled over the aftr bridge by id — never by hand, never by filename.
Answering the first one unblocks scene 12. The rest change how much gets built, not whether.
AZTEC 1948