Famous moments, made from tokens
Scene-Flix is where the films play; scene kit is where they come from. Every film here is data before it is a picture. The characters, props and sets are tokens in a kit, a script is a list of beats, and the film is drawn from that, frame by frame. Nothing is animated by hand, and nothing goes out until the facts on screen have been checked.
01 A cast made of tokens
A character is a short entry: head shape, hair, nose, clothes, the prop they carry, how they dance, and the instrument their voice is played on. The renderer reads it and draws them, so a new face is a few lines, not a drawing session. Change a colour token and every film that character is in changes with it.
The rules are written into the kit, not left to taste. Public figures appear only as parody. Every human has a body, never a floating head. Private people, like the sender of the first text message, are made-up stand-ins, and their real names appear only on the end card, as fact.
Costumes and wardrobes are tokens too. A Halloween costume is a list of parts put on over a character, from wings and a tail to a full mummy's wrap, and any shot can dress anyone its own way.
02 Props and sets that know what they can do
A prop declares its actions: the Flyer spins its propellers, the flag waves or hangs slack, the vial glows, the bath fills and overflows. A script asks for an action by name, and the drawing reads its strength each frame. Sets are drawn the same way, from a stone hall at Christmas to a 1991 cockpit with an H-pattern gate.
Light is a prop as well. A follow spot swings off one act and finds the next one in the wings, a flashlight lights a face from under the chin, colour washes sweep the stage, and a strobe hits on the beat. A script cues them like anything else.
03 A script is a list of beats
A film is written as beats: who says what, how they feel, what they do, how long to wait. This is the setup in Roland the Farter, as written:
{ emotion: { roland: "delighted" }, say: ["roland", "One jump. One whistle. One..."], pause: 0.2 },
{ emotion: { henry2: "flat" }, say: ["henry2", "Yes, yes. Go on."], pause: 0.5 },
A build step turns the beats into tracks on a clock: positions, poses, expressions, mouths, camera moves. Mouths come from the words, so lip sync is part of the script, not a pass at the end. Some scripts start as a one-line premise drafted by a language model against the real cast list and checked for names that don't exist. Curie's “perfectly safe” glowing vial began that way.
04 Drawn, voiced and filmed
Each frame is drawn as vector art from the tracks, thirty times a second, and recorded straight to video. Voices are played on instruments shaped by the same mouth tracks, never an imitation of a real voice. Every film also has a music bed of its own, generated locally with an open music model and picked by ear. The dance engine gives every character a groove of their own, with loop breakers so a crowd never moves in lockstep.
05 Checked before it goes out
The joke is in what really happened. Every claim a film makes on screen, its dates, numbers, quotes and attributions, goes to a fact desk before the film is published, and each film opens on a quote that says how real it is: from the record, as the story goes, or as nobody said it. Wrong claims are fixed and re-filmed. The dialogue is the cartoon's; the facts are the record's.
06 A loop, not a pipeline
The films are made by a small team: Tony directs, Claude builds and films, and Grok checks the facts, critiques every render and produces the music. A critique becomes a build becomes a new render, round after round, until the picture carries the joke with the sound off. Some fixes become checks that run on every build, like the one that holds a guitarist's fretting elbow on the ribs.
- Premise, from Tony or drafted from a line
- Script of beats, against the real cast and props
- Fact desk: every claim on screen checked
- Render and critique, in rounds
- Published here, with share and embed
Next: designed voices for the lines, made the same way and never cloned from anyone.