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. Every film goes from a napkin sketch to a finished piece with the process visible the whole way, which is the point: AI as an instrument, not a slot machine.
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.
Napkin Films is the creative-work corner of Coherent Complexity, the umbrella idea behind everything I build: make a complex system legible enough to work inside, then leave the map where the next person can find it. Here the system is the act of making, and the map is the visible pipeline from idea to film.
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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 ↗ See the full series, cluster by cluster →How music is actually built, walked one altitude at a time. No teacher on camera. Everything you see is driven by the real audio: a live oscilloscope, a harmonic ladder, the drops drawn in four colors. The companion field guide is The Language of Sound.
Open the Language of Sound playlist ↗ See the full series, season by season →Distributed systems and the AWS Solutions Architect (SAA-C03) exam, taught as story. One concept per episode, each a room on a hand-drawn map. Audio-first: it works on a walk with your eyes closed. The full roadmap, wing by wing, lives at Learning Maps.
See the full series, wing by wing →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.
Season Two goes inside the machine: eight episodes on how a synthesizer makes its voices, starting with Subtractive. Start with a bright sawtooth, carve away what you don't need. W...
Out of Your Mind, Song 14. Alan Watts on wu-wei and flow, scored as a hovering Satie waltz where a celeste plays each note a beat before the hand arrives, so the piano is already p...
STOP LOOKING is Song 13 in Out of Your Mind, and the chase film. Stop hunting the one who is looking, because the thing you are searching for is the one doing the searching. The ey...
THIS IS IT is Song 12 in Out of Your Mind, and the radiant film. It is the warm twin of One Hand. Where that one was a black void and silence, this one fills with light. The it you...
Six short films on what happens to data the moment it stops fitting on one machine: the forced choice, the dial, taste, the cache, the branch library, the shard. The first wing of ...
OG Bobby Johnson's vocal chops over a wide, driving void mix, with Der Gouverneur and Anubis trading rhymes in the dark and a Plan 9 cameo to wave you off. Abstract cosmic eye cand...
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 appear here first. The technical writing on how each one is made lives across the projects page, and the instrumental scores are collected on the music page, on Bandcamp and available to license.