Nothing is held for two minutes, not even one visual

planShots skipped cut planning entirely when a section had a single visual to
show — "nothing to cut to" — and the exemption swallowed the ceiling with it.
Adding a scene shifted the casting enough to land a 150 BPM track in that case,
and it held one image for 151.98 seconds against a 22-second limit. Any new
scene could have exposed it; the shot-length gate had simply never met a
single-visual section before.

The premise was wrong rather than the arithmetic. A shot boundary changes the
FRAMING as well as the image, so the same visual filmed again at another size is
a shot, and the ceiling is about how long one image is held rather than about how
many images a section has. Single-visual sections now plan shots like any other.

What the single case still suppresses is the hard cut: cutting straight between
two framings of one image is a jump cut, so those boundaries always dissolve.

Two intermediate versions were wrong in ways worth not repeating: splitting the
section into equal spans put a 23.5s shot past the ceiling once the cuts snapped
to downbeats, and read as a metronome (cv 0.048) to the rhythm check.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

flow-state/src/look/shots.js

@@ -137,7 +137,18 @@ export function planShots(section, track, bias, variantCount, rng, story = null)
     const lengths = fitPattern(rhythmFor(bias.energy, rng, story), barSeconds);
     const shortest = Math.min(...lengths);
 
-    // A section with only one visual to show has nothing to cut to.
+    // A section with only one visual to show has nothing to cut TO. It still
+    // gets shot boundaries: a boundary changes the FRAMING as well as the
+    // image, so the same visual filmed again at another size is a shot, and the
+    // ceiling is about how long one image is held rather than about how many
+    // images a section has.
+    //
+    // This used to skip cut planning entirely, and the exemption swallowed the
+    // ceiling with it — measured, a 150 BPM track held one visual for 151.98
+    // seconds, seven times the limit, which is exactly the complaint this whole
+    // level of hierarchy exists to answer. What it does still suppress is the
+    // hard cut: cutting straight between two framings of one image is a jump
+    // cut, so those boundaries always dissolve.
     const single = variantCount < 2;
 
     // Walk the pattern, laying shots end to end from the section start. Each cut
@@ -149,7 +160,7 @@ export function planShots(section, track, bias, variantCount, rng, story = null)
     const downbeats = track.tempo.downbeats || [];
     const cuts = [];
 
-    if (!single) {
+    {
         let at = section.start;
         for (let k = 0; k < 512; k++) {
             const raw = at + lengths[k % lengths.length];
@@ -193,7 +204,10 @@ export function planShots(section, track, bias, variantCount, rng, story = null)
             // edited, but on anything calmer it reads as a glitch, so cuts are
             // gated on real energy rather than sprinkled everywhere: nothing below
             // the threshold ever cuts, and only the loudest material cuts often.
-            hardCut: bias.energy > HARD_CUT_ENERGY
+            // A single-visual section changes framing, not image. Cutting hard
+            // between two framings of the same thing is a jump cut, so those
+            // boundaries always dissolve.
+            hardCut: !single && bias.energy > HARD_CUT_ENERGY
                 && rng.bool(Math.min(0.85, (bias.energy - HARD_CUT_ENERGY) * 2.5)),
         });
     }