Découpage: Directorial Audio-Visual Control for Long Multi-Shot Video Generation

In cinematic storytelling, sound and visual transitions do not always coincide in lockstep: dialogue frequently bridges across cuts to reveal reactions or introduces new scenes via J- and L-cuts, while deliberate silences pace the scene. Existing audio-visual generative frameworks, however, lack explicit mechanisms to coordinate independent visual and acoustic timing over extended horizons. As narrative duration and shot complexity scale, these systems struggle to maintain long-range dialogue pacing—often hallucinating speech during intended silences or erroneously driving mouth movements on silent listeners. To enable fine-grained cinematic control, we present Découpage, a screenplay-driven framework for long-form, multi-shot, and multi-character joint audio-video generation. Rather than coupling modality boundaries by default, Découpage uncouples generation into independently bounded visual and acoustic tracks governed by persistent character identities. Découpage builds on a joint audio-video diffusion model with dual-schedule temporal cross-attention, incorporating a directorial Lip-sync mechanism that selectively decouples speech conditioning from visual facial dynamics during off-screen dialogue. On multi-shot conversational benchmarks, Découpage achieves precise control over shot transitions, audio timing, and visibility-aware lip synchronization, directing 15- to 60-second screenplay-driven audio-video generation with multimodal coherence.