# Common pipeline — Nantucket full-body historical characters One engine, five Tier 1 briefs. Do not stand up a new company per figure. Stand up a **season capacity**: scholar network, rights desk, art/animation pod, conversation stack, and a maintenance shift that reads logs. Season order already argued in the opportunities note: 1. Mitchell 2. Gardner as second chair on Mitchell’s engine 3. Essex dual after trauma review 4. Meeting House / Boston with MAAH 5. Veeder/Brock cabin as VR extra This file is how the *work* is staffed and sequenced so those briefs share bones. --- ## 0. Operating principles (Nantucket-specific) - **Institution before mesh.** MMA, NHA, Atheneum, MAAH. If the owner of the room says no, there is no character. - **Edition on the credits.** Kendall, Palmer, NHA 1984 Nickerson, 1845 petitions — named. - **Summer throughput.** 90-second approach + booked evening slots. Do not put a 15-minute Q&A on Straight Wharf in July. - **Two islands of meaning.** Whaling spectacle is already sold. These characters earn their keep by being sourced and by dropping character. - **Shared renderer.** Unreal + MetaHuman, Pixel Stream or local GPU for kiosks, Quest for rooms, billboard AR for streets. One identity package compiled three ways. --- ## 1. Governance and scholars ### Standing roles | Seat | Function | Likely fill | |---|---|---| | Executive producer | Cutoff, label, season, money | Project lead | | Institution producer | Room, insurance, docents | MMA / NHA / MAAH staff assigned | | Historian of record (per figure) | Veto on text | Finger (Mitchell); White/Karttunen (Boston/Ross); maritime fellow (Essex, Veeder); Quaker historian (Mott) | | Conversation designer | Question bank, refusals, Chautauqua clock | Shared across season | | Log editor | Weekly then monthly review of public questions | Can be the conversation designer + historian | NHA Research Fellows (Philbrick, Karttunen, Tyler, White, et al.) are the existing brain trust. Use them as a board, not as unpaid content. ### Scholar workflow per figure 1. Gate memo (sources, likeness, heat, cutoff). 2. Corpus inventory with shelf marks and URLs. 3. Red-line of the 400-question bank. 4. Sign-off on authored monologue. 5. Blind check of 50 generated answers by a *second* historian. 6. Quarterly log review after open. Pay for 1–6. Two courtesy lectures do not count as veto. --- ## 2. Legal and rights desk One counsel (or one firm) for the season, not five. **Always** - Collections agreement: MMA, NHA, Vassar, FHL Swarthmore, MAAH. Reproduction of *photographs and manuscript images* is the usual blocker; 19th-c. published text is often PD in the US. - Actor agreement: face/voice, all surfaces, future fine-tunes, residuals or buyout. - Venue: insurance, ADA, night-sky lighting at MMA, Meeting House load limits. - Privacy: question logs without visitor faces unless a signed school DPA. **Sometimes** - Philbrick / Penguin courtesy if Essex programming tracks *In the Heart of the Sea*. - Trademark watch on “Maria Mitchell” as institutional name (MMA). - Tribal consultation letter if Thankful Micah or any Wampanoag first person is in scope. - Massachusetts publicity law is not the binding issue for these death dates; **reproductions and room ownership** are. Deliverable of this desk: a one-page rights map per figure, stored next to the corpus repo. --- ## 3. Marketing and public language Shared ban list (from the ground rules, applied to ACK tourism copy): - No “meet the dead,” “brought back,” “talk to Maria.” - Yes: “An interpretation from sources dated to [year]. It can be wrong.” Channel split: | Audience | Message | Surface | |---|---|---| | Summer visitors | 90-second comet / cabin / petition | AR postcard, kiosk rest pose | | Members / schools | Booked Chautauqua + classroom lock | MMA Discovery, NHA education | | Press | Methodology page + historian quote | Not a deepfake reel | Collaborate with *Spirits Within Us* (Theater Workshop of Nantucket / Novation / NCTV, 2026). They already trained the island audience on first-person women from NHA sources. Credit them; consider a shared night rather than a rival show. Do not put Essex on a restaurant sandwich board. --- ## 4. Artwork (look, wardrobe, place) Shared art director across figures so the island does not look like five different games. **Likeness pipeline** 1. Photograph / portrait inventory with rights. 2. Mesh-to-MetaHuman or sculpt. 3. Age variants if the dated self requires them (Mitchell 1847 vs 1875). 4. Two LODs: Cine (kiosk), Optimized (Quest/AR). 5. Uncertainty label when there is no portrait (Boston). **Wardrobe** - Period costume historian with NHA textile collections. - Marvelous Designer / CLO → MetaHuman Outfit (refit across bodies). - Quaker plain dress is not one costume: Mitchell’s Vassar years are not Mott’s 1790s childhood. **Place kits** (build once, reuse) | Kit | Reuse | |---|---| | Vestal Street yard + roof | Mitchell comet; William Mitchell add-on | | Atheneum interior | Mitchell librarian; Mott echo; Douglass *scene* (not a Douglass mind) | | Whaling Museum theater / deck | Essex dual; Veeder cabin adjacent | | Generic whaleship cabin | Veeder and Brock | | Meeting House interior | Boston / petitions — modest lighting | | Street anchors (USDZ) | Vestal, Fair, York/Pleasant, Centre (dated) | Do not reconstruct the entire 1840 waterfront in season 1. --- ## 5. Animation and performance Shared capture week on-island or in a Boston stage, multiple figures. | Layer | Method | Who | |---|---|---| | Hero monologue | Mocap or Live Link Face + body, directed | Actor + director who has read the corpus | | Gesture bible | Rhetorical tags (point, open hand, write, raise tube) | Reused across Quaker/professional bodies | | Idle life | Weight shift, look-at visitor, breathe | Kiosk always-on | | Unscripted face | MetaHuman audio-driven / Audio2Face | After TTS or actor pickup | | Dual floor-passing | Animation notify + moderator policy | Essex, Mott×Gardner, Veeder×Brock | Record **voice bibles** (30–60 min) in the same week: calm, sharp, grief, public address. Captions burned into the pipeline, not added later. Children’s cut: shorter monologue, no Essex dual, Veeder grief behind a docent gate. --- ## 6. AI creation, curation, maintenance ### Creation ``` Institution license → dated corpus A/B/C (separate stores) → embeddings + citation IDs → retrieval first → generate only inside retrieved span + cutoff + refusal policy → speech + face + optional gesture tag ``` Nantucket rule: **Boston-class figures default to retrieval + canned bridges.** Mitchell/Mott/Veeder may generate inside the fence. Essex dual generates only within each speaker’s own book. Shared stack: - Versioned git (or equivalent) of plain-text corpora with shelf marks - RAG index per figure, never one blended “Nantucket brain” - Policy layer: cutoff, trauma list, living-politician ban, companionship ban - Staff dashboard: pin a new FAQ overnight without retraining - Analytics: questions, not faces ### Curation (the real job) - Week 1–12 after open: historian + designer read **all** logs. - After that: monthly, plus any press spike. - Corrections increment the corpus version on the credits. - Seasonal question packs (comet anniversary, 1845 petition anniversary, *Nauticon* landfall week). ### Maintenance - Kiosk image: offline monologue fallback. - GPU stream budget if Pixel Streaming (summer concurrency). - Actor pickup session once a year if voice must expand. - School allowlist so district filters do not block the endpoint. - Contractual freeze: marketing cannot loosen cutoff without the historian of record and the institution producer. When a figure fails a log review (repeated invention, trauma mishandle), take the unscripted channel down. Authored monologue stays. That is a feature. --- ## 7. Shared team (season, not per hero) | Function | FTE across season | |---|---| | Producer | 0.5–1 | | Institution liaison | 0.25 × number of venues | | Historians of record | 0.2–0.4 each active figure | | Conversation designer | 0.5 | | Character artist | 0.5–1 | | Costume / look-dev | 0.25–0.5 | | Tech animator | 0.5 | | UE / streaming / AR | 0.5–1 | | Backend / RAG | 0.25–0.5 | | Counsel | retainer | | Actors + director | burst weeks | | QA / access | 0.25 | | Log editor | 0.2 after open | First hero (Mitchell) carries the engine cost. Figures 2–5 should cost **art + corpus + venue**, not a new stack. --- ## 8. Calendar (compressed) | Quarter | Work | |---|---| | Q1 | Rights desk + Mitchell corpus + likeness start + place kit Vestal/Atheneum | | Q2 | Mitchell performance capture, conversation, compile, eval | | Q3 | Mitchell soft open (summer evenings / Oct comet). Gardner corpus in parallel | | Q4 | Essex ethics packet + dual corpora. Veeder transcript ingest | | Year 2 Q1–Q2 | Essex after-hours dual *or* Meeting House MOU build — not both at once | | Year 2 Q3 | Veeder cabin extra on the ship kit already built for Essex | Do not premiere Essex in July on the pier. --- ## 9. Money, rolled up | Item | Band | |---|---| | Shared engine first year (stack, place kits, legal retainer, producer) | $80k–$150k | | Mitchell hero | $150k–$250k all-in if engine is separate; ~$220–350k if engine is inside this line | | Each additional corpus + wardrobe + monologue on the same engine | $40k–$120k | | Essex dual premium (two bodies + trauma) | $200k–$400k | | Meeting House retrieval install | $80k–$180k | | Annual maintenance (logs, GPU, pickups, licenses) | $25k–$60k | Grant logic that actually exists on-island: MMA’s NSF education adjacency, Mass Cultural Facilities / Mass Cultural Council, NHA members, private science and maritime funders. Do not pitch this as an NFT or a souvenir app. --- ## 10. Done-when checklist (every figure) - [ ] Institution MOU - [ ] Rights map - [ ] Cutoff on splash - [ ] Corpora A/B/C with shelf marks - [ ] Historian veto named - [ ] 200 tested Q&As - [ ] Authored monologue - [ ] Out-of-character beat - [ ] Captions - [ ] Trauma protocol if applicable - [ ] Offline fallback - [ ] Methodology page - [ ] Log cadence assigned If a row is blank, it is not a Nantucket public character yet.