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.
The studio also lives at napkinfilms.com.
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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 ↗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.
SAME NERVE is Song 08 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one about pain and pleasure: the same nerve fires for both, and the...
A Plan-9-flavored study of Halsey's "Gasoline." OG Bobby Johnson spits, the cyborg bunny Plan 9 answers in tune, and a deep Alpine philosopher says the quiet part out loud: the bug...
The opposing view of coherent complexity. A cold blue machine of rings and gears and towers cracks, collapses, and reveals a warm breathing core of life that blooms to fill the fra...
Making Complexity Legible is Case I of The Cartographer of Complexity, a new Napkin Films series about Making Complexity Visible. The idea: you cannot make a complex system simple ...
EGO IS AN INCH is Song 07 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one about the ego: an abstraction like an inch or a line of lon...
ATTENTION IS THE LOOM is Song 06 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one about attention: what you attend to becomes the clot...
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.