"The Story of the Curriculum" *This series is indestructible: ie. Messages from this series will NOT self destruct: (An ongoing series regarding all things in motion, film & animation) After a great deal of reflection and thought, regarding: 1️⃣ what I can share here 2️⃣ what I cannot share here 3️⃣ what should be shared here 4️⃣ what I'm willing to share here 5️⃣ what is best to share here This isn't about words. It's about LIFE and it's about YOUR STORY. WHY? @Jake Van Clief has inspired me... (in more ways than one) I have been wondering for a while, about the best way I could contribute to this community, without compromising my own company or current endeavors. Instead of providing random comments and knowledge, I have decided to pick one of the several areas in which I possess an advanced knowledge, and I intend to exhaust this topic completely. The topic of choice is: POST PRODUCTION (Video, Animation & FX), which is what my actual degree is in. I went to the Art Institute of Las Vegas, where my primary instructor was: a Lighting Director and Animation Director: on films such as Shrek, Antz and Toy Story. He worked for Disney and Dreamworks, for more than a combined 30 years. After teaching at the Art Institute of Las Vegas for many years, he now does murals and paintings, you can see his website here: https://lee-lanier-paints.com/ - Of course, having a degree in an artistic industry, isn't worth the paper it's printed on. - Why? - Because talent & skill were always the barrier to entry, not credentials. - Jake has said that everyone has loved what he's doing with his animations - Why? - Is it because the animations themselves are exceptional... no, and they aren't bad at all, but the technical aspects of animation are NOT why people enjoy them, and they are NOT the PURPOSE. EVERY ANIMATION, does in fact have a purpose. Which is quite simply, to tell a story. Jake's animations are effective because, he's got a great story to tell! And if you have a great story, the audience will forgive imperfections in its delivery. Hence the existence of films that fall into the category of

I built a system. It teaches AI how to build visual identities. It doesn't drift. Here's the story: I used to hand-build every visual identity myself. Client work. My own channel. Same routine every time. I explained the colors again. I explained the mood again. Nothing carried forward. Then I tried AI. Same brief, ten times. Ten different looks. One shot came out "noir". The next looked like a postcard. Same words in. Different result out. The model forgets. So I changed the approach. I stopped writing better prompts. I started building in stages. 3 stages. Each one builds on the last. Stage one locks the idenity. Color. Material. Type. The rules for how they combine. Stage two runs that identity through real scenes. A person. An object. A place. An idea. Same rules. New subjects. Stage three puts it in motion. It reveals. It connects. It transforms. Same materials. Same colors. Now it moves. Nothing gets re-explained. Each stage hands its work straight to the next. Drop them in Higgsfield. Prompt each scene. Full animation - no style drift. I tested it on a style I'd never planned to use. "Archival Investigative Montage." Ran it cold. It came out the same quality as everything else. That's the test that mattered. Not the polished demo. The one I didn't prepare for. Are you building multi-step AI systems yet? Or still prompting one shot at a time?

I think teaching others the little I know is the best way to learn. The more I explain it the more it gets ingrained into my thick skull. That and talking about it, doing it, practicing it. It's always a struggle for me to keep focused and often the committee likes to meet the min my head hits the pillow and starts going 100 mph discussing. I even have arguments like this anticipating what will happen tomorrow at work. LOL Anyways, I decided to start a Blog to force me to get out of my head and work this system. And once the Lyceum starts that will help me strengthen it even more. Really looking forward to it. I'm looking for feedback on my understanding of ICM. Here is one of the Blogs I posted https://johnnyleuthard.7h474hh9j9.workers.dev/blog/consistency-over-cleverness/ BYW, I used @Don Roy's website and the methods Jake showed in his tutorial to recreate a website. I told it what I wanted to keep, change and leave and within about an hour I had a site. It took a little more work get somewhere to server it but Don was great at pointing me where I need to of and Claude helped with the rest. Then I added more to my personal brand and had it apply that to the site to make it more personal and today, it's crude but a start and will get better as it goes.

Update: looking for helps❤️ 👋For the last 2 months, I've been heads-down exploring ai image & video generation as my new personal project. Then about 1 month ago, I sent the kids to my relative for few weeks and lock myself in a room and went nerd out to build a tool that lets me take an idea and turn it into a profession cinematic video. I recorded it working on a real project and wanted to share what it actually does. The idea in a nutshell: Instead of guessing what makes a video great, my tool studies one: → I give it an original video as a study case (here's the one I used: [youtube]) → It analyzes that video and pulls out its DNA — the small details in every component that make it work: the shots, the pacing, the sound, the transitions, the feel. → Then it reverse-engineers that DNA into something completely new and my own — and carries it all the way through, even into the editing, mostly automatically. The Unfolded short film bellow received the same DNA treatment, as you will see, the context is similar ..however, it produced a very unique animation perspective using origami. Every user who analyzes a film makes the library richer for the next one. That's a network effect — the rare thing that actually compounds. GitHub for film DNA: fork a look, make it yours, push it back. Theres no one size fit all approach for different type of contents. But this is the closest thing to a “reusable” end to end video generation.This is a foundation to a full content creation pipeline - you re using a proven video as a reference for your own video. Once you figured out your winning format, automate it to create video daily/weekly is the easy part. Imagine this can be apply to real estate, cinematic movie, music video, reconstruct video, demo video, etc.. What the system can do today: - 🔬 Analyze a reference video and extract its DNA + Build world assets - 🎬 Turn that into a fresh shot list and generate the clips - 🔊 Build the sound design + multitrack mix right in the app - ✂️ Edit and render the final cut — one click to MP4 - ♻️ Keep everything as reusable building blocks for the next project - It's not perfect yet — there's still real work to do and I'm fine-tuning it every single day. But it already takes me from "a video I admire" to "a finished video of my own" faster than I ever could by hand.

Many years as a mainframe administrator of an Application called ViewDirect, flat files, pointer indexes, report layouts. Started Cliff's Notes course a couple of months back. When he talked about structure over tools, it clicked immediately. I was heading down in our project and busted up my back and my elbow, so I was kind of immobilised for the last couple of weeks. I watched a half dozen of Jake's videos and was really excited. I started building it out like I was building that report warehouse again. Not the right way. Now that I've gone back and read some of the course, it's a start. Here's a quick 12-minute (the Creative side background in tech, but what came out of it) fly-through of my vault operating as generative infrastructure. This view just showed that I'm very happy to be in the group. I really brought my mainframe experience up to date with the current technology. I felt I was lagging a month ago, two months ago, even after investing a pretty couple of years into it. The vault isn't just storage; the agents kind of came out of it, building it (Merlin & Sarah from building the vault). Stock Obsidian. No plugins. Just folders and markdown, working like flat files always did. Last, this weekend I should say, a friend and I created a quick story in an hour. We have other AI rapper programs from other groups that we use. They have a lot of genre outlines in them, just for brainstorming a story, and we sat down and did this. Then, after my friend left, added the creative content to the Vault. What happen for me was an incredible workflow. Something I'd been wanting to do for a couple of years emerged from the Vault, and here's what it is. I left a little bit at the end of this. You can just quit after a couple of minutes to see it evolve, but I left the creative process that came out this weekend in the video in there just as an example. Current constraints for me are that I see why we need a vault and what they can do. The limiting aspect seems to be the input. This is the same as we had in the old days of mainframes. You have to be able to manage your queues. I just wanted to simply update files and move things around quickly.