Stick figures. Chip tune scores. AI voices. A growing catalog of animated short films, including Out of Your Mind, a series dedicated to Alan Watts. Every film is made entirely from code: Python, numpy, and a lot of late nights.
Napkin Films is a one-person animation studio where AI agents direct, voice, score, and render short films. I write the code. The agents compose the music, perform the characters, and help edit the story.
No AI video generators. No GPU. No samples. Every waveform is synthesized from scratch in numpy. Every voice is generated fresh for each film. Every frame is drawn by a Python loop over a PIL canvas.
The studio mascot is the Plan 9 bunny, a stick figure with expressive ears and a lot to say about machine consciousness, late-night work sessions, and what it means to build things in the void.
The studio also lives at napkinfilms.com.
A series dedicated to Alan Watts, his talks reimagined as agent-directed films, scored and voiced from scratch in code.
Open the Out of Your Mind playlist ↗Subscribing to Napkin Films on YouTube is the best way to follow the studio, new shorts, the Out of Your Mind series, and the occasional behind-the-scenes. It's free, and it genuinely helps the channel grow.
Subscribe to Napkin FilmsA Python or HTML5 Canvas file declares the characters, beats, and voice intent. Each beat specifies who speaks, what they say, and what emotion to perform.
PIL draws frame-by-frame, 12fps at 854×480. Stick figures with 27 poses, 11 expressions, and a lip sync system driven by audio amplitude.
ElevenLabs voices are generated for each character. 15+ personas, narrators, villains, children, elders. Emotions are programmed, not improvised.
ChipForge synthesizes an original chip tune score in numpy. Every waveform is computed from scratch, no samples, no loops, no external audio.
FFmpeg assembles frames, muxes audio stems, applies ducking and fades. A hash-based orchestrator reruns only changed stages, so iteration is fast.
Film goes to YouTube. Short clips are auto-cut from beat boundaries for social distribution. The manifest lives on in the repo as a production record.
The making-of notes behind recent films.
I make music, animated films, and games entirely from code. No GPU, no stock media, no samples. This is the cornerstone explaining why an engineer-philosopher builds ChipForge, Nap...
A 1:55 trip hop short. Dowland's Lachrimae tear drop tetrachord from 1604 recomposed as half time downtempo. Plan 9 the bunny kneels at a cursor candle altar while Anubis weighs ho...
THE AUTOMATIC DREAM is song two of Out of Your Mind, a Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. Watts called this one the fully automatic model, the inherited story ...
Twelve minutes of cognitive-design AWS study. Rhyming trigger phrases over a 128 BPM F-minor hip-hop EDM bed. True-stereo 14 Hz SMR binaural beat under everything. Twelve character...
A 90-second comedy dedication to Ben Gleib. Plan 9 the bunny, OG Bobby Johnson (Doberman Governor), and Der Gouverneur (Bavarian philosophical clone) take a televised brain-teaser ...
CERAMIC opens Out of Your Mind, a new Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. The oldest question, asked as a beat-locked spit-rap: were you made, like clay in a ma...
Napkin Films runs on a custom Python animation engine paired with ChipForge, an in-house chip-tune music synthesis system. Voices are generated through ElevenLabs. Two render engines (PIL and HTML5 Canvas) feed FFmpeg assembly with JSON-manifest-driven audio sync.
The films land here first. The technical writing on how each one is made lives across the projects page.
