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.
THE DESCENT is eleven films that drill every decision fork in the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam. 265 forks, ten regions, forty three minutes. Free, no signup, no course. T...
ANATTA is Song 20 in Out of Your Mind, and its claim is that there is no permanent self. So the claim is enforced as a law over the score: no note reaches its bar line, every one o...
TAT TVAM ASI is Song 17 in Out of Your Mind. The whole film is D Mixolydian, so there is no C sharp anywhere in it, which means the music has no leading tone and physically cannot ...
The last room of the principles arc. The biggest cost decisions are not line items you trim later, they are baked into the shape of the architecture, and they point two ways.
The cost movement continues. The Promise is how you pay less for the load you can count on. The Shelf is how you pay less for what you store, and the bet hidden in every cheaper sh...
The cost movement of Learning Maps opens. The Ballroom is the core flip of the whole cloud: you stop owning capacity for your peak and start renting it for your need.
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.