I'm creating an animation studio today

Miyazaki comes from a story driven, humanist viewpoint, and no one should be surprised by his reaction who are familiar with his work.

But then, who cares if he doesn’t appreciate what they’ve done. They’ll go on to sell it to games, and improve it to work in other applications (perhaps robotics?). But I’m struggling to see the technology produce a ‘Totoro’ movie that my three year old will want to watch thirty times, so I think Miyazaki’s opinion isn’t misplaced for what he makes.

It’s alive! Two days ago I got the screenplay parsing program working. It can now take a screenplay and make an animatic/storyboard from it. I’m writing a short film screenplay right now to test it.

So now we’ve automated animation, the next step is to automate object creation. For now though, that’s the stop-gap, art asset creation. We still have to do that manually (or you can use the primitives the AI has access to by default). Oh, also rendering time. I can’t change that, it depends on your lighting quality, textures, number of polygons on screen, etc.

I’ll whip up a video and post it. Let me get the lighting rigs and background finished, and then I’ll start cranking out videos.

Anyone have a screenplay or teleplay laying around they want to see a movie made from? I could use it to train the AI and see how close to your vision it creates.

Another idea I had was to go look for old screenplays or watch a movie I like and kind of write down the screenplay from the movie. The latter way I can specify shot types and make the “remake” look visually identical to the original. Might be fun.

Oh c’mon, you absolutely have to!

I wrote a short fan fictionny screenplay many years ago that never came to anything. I don’t think there’s any specific IP violations…as long as you’re sure to call them “laser swords”. It’s noir-ish. Would you be interested?

Fuck, now Nick Cage is taking roles in Guap’s autonomously written movies? That guy’s got no standards at all.

Don’t talk about Guap like that.

Townies might finally see the light of day!

I slapped a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International” license on after taking another clean-up pass at an old “lightsaber noir.” It’s on dropbox now, and basically you can do whatever you want with it, as long as you attribute it to moi. It’s in Word, I suppose if you want I could put it in Final Draft. It’s called The Two-Timer.

I also thought, if you want content that is basically scripts to test your algorithms, find radio plays that are in the public domain and use their transcripts (as long as their transcripts are also in the public domain). Or scripts from much older plays on Project Gutenberg.

Thanks, and thanks for the advice on source material.

So the CEO of a games company just invited me to demo this thing at E3. Holy cow, no pressure! He told me “Let’s meet Monday in LA.” Ok. “At the Staples Center.” Ok. “At E3.” What?!?

Squee! Maybe next year I’ll have my own booth. I hope he’s impressed, it could open a lot of doors.

Good luck!!

What do you have to show?

A really crappy demo and a lot of energy and passion! But yeah, it’s a prototype and doesn’t flow well yet, I’m working on it. Will never have time to change any code by next week, I’ll have to write a screenplay that shows it off a bit.

Well crunched and the demo is a little better now. Man this is exciting.

Best of luck. Knock 'em dead.

Good luck!

Thanks guys! Just finished the meeting at the Marriott. Apparently hotel lobbies are where all the pitches and deals happen. My meeting went super well and the CEO agreed to introduce me to the videogame community, act as an advisor, and introduce me to venture capitalists. At the end of the meeting I met the COO of Rovio which makes Angry Birds and an EVP of Illumination, which makes Minions, etc. Pretty sweet meeting!

All around a success and a great time. This convention center area of LA is pretty cool.

Woo hoo!

You go, girl!

Great to hear, Guap. Keep us updated.