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The paper plane: a film and the system that made it

Six short lessons on The paper plane, an animated film Allan made with Claude that flies a paper plane through 25 art styles, and on the system behind it. You learn how a picture is made to move, how the film was built stage by stage with checks and reviews, how little Allan wrote to direct the next film, how the AI checks its own art with fresh eyes, the strange mistakes an AI makes, and how the work carried on when the AI was cut off. Each lesson has a video and a written version with pictures.

Lessons
6
Price
Free, with no login
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Lesson 1 of 6: How do you make a picture move? A paper plane through 25 art styles

Lessons

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  1. Lesson 1, start here

    How do you make a picture move? A paper plane through 25 art styles

    The one trick behind every moving picture, from shadow puppets to video games, and what changes when the same trick is drawn in a different art style.

  2. Lesson 2

    Behind the paper plane: the system that made a 25-style animated film

    How the paper plane film was made: a prepared project, five stages with seven gates, and checks and human reviews that covered for each other.

  3. Lesson 3

    Thirteen messages: how little I wrote before an AI made a 12-minute film (Behind the behind, episode 1)

    Allan wrote 13 messages, 884 words, before an AI built a 12 and a half minute film; this lesson shows what those words were spent on and why so few were enough.

  4. Lesson 4

    The AI checks its own art: never with the eyes that made it (Behind the behind, episode 2)

    Why the AI helper that draws a picture is never the one that judges it, how a fresh reviewer checks the pictures the way a viewer sees them, and what that caught.

  5. Lesson 5

    Ghosts in the machine: the strange mistakes an AI makes (Behind the behind, episode 3)

    The strange mistakes machines made while these films were built (words heard in silence, numbers let through, pictures that broke between samples, a false alarm) and the checks that caught each one.

  6. Lesson 6

    The night the AI got cut off: how the work carried on (Behind the behind, episode 4)

    How the build of a film carried on after the AI hit its usage limit in the night: what was written down, and how a fresh session that remembered nothing picked up the work from the files.