The most expensive sentence in a studio is ‘let’s just start her again’. Replanting feels decisive and is usually waste: the old series is orphaned, the new one inherits nothing, and the fault that prompted it — almost always a paraphrased card or an unjudged sitting — is carried into the fresh soil untouched. This room’s schedule is duller and works better: plant once, tend always.
The tending schedule
Water: the daily frame
The check-in picture, briefed from the untouched card. Small, regular, unglamorous — the growth habit of the whole series.
Weed: the weekly cull
One cold review a week: identity pass, craft pass, purpose pass. Frames that fail are cut while the cutting is cheap.
Feed: finishing, sparingly
Edits, swaps and upscales for keepers only, in chain order. Feeding drafts is how budgets die in every studio.
Tended this way, a series compounds. Each sitting’s keepers raise the standard the next sitting is judged against, and the lineage lengthens without forking. The sapling on the desk approves: nothing in its care is dramatic, and it is thriving on exactly that.
Questions
When is replanting actually right?
When the character herself is retired — a closed series, an announced ending. Not as a response to one disappointing sitting.
What is the commonest tending failure?
Skipping the cull in a busy week. Weeds do not skip theirs.
How long until a series feels established?
Usually three or four tended sittings: enough keepers that the card’s woman is unmistakably a person with a past.