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

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:

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)

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.

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)

First hero (Mitchell) carries the engine cost. Figures 2–5 should cost art + corpus + venue, not a new stack.

8. Calendar (compressed)

Do not premiere Essex in July on the pier.

9. Money, rolled up

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.