A cast of voices, each with a pace and a manner. Recorded voices are cloned on the machine from a short sample; a voice can speak as a narrator, a conversation, a persuasion or an explanation.
Film maker · not published, available on request
Words first. The film follows.
Every analytical piece we publish comes with a film, and every film is made the same way: a script written as beats against the spoken words, voiced, drawn, typeset and rendered on one machine, with nothing sent anywhere. Change one line and the film is re made in minutes, exactly, with everything else untouched. Doodle Reader is that method, and the tool that runs it.
Most explainer video is made the other way round: pictures first, words fitted to them, and a change to the argument means a day in an editor. Our pieces are arguments, with numbers that carry their basis, and they change. So the film had to be built from the words outward.
A script is data: speakers and their voices, scenes of spoken text, and beats anchored to phrases in that text, each saying what appears on screen and when it leaves. A line of text, a formula typeset exactly as it is on this site, a drawing described in a sentence, a photograph. The tool voices the words, draws the pictures in one house style, proofs the layout so nothing ever sits on anything else, and renders. The same script renders landscape for a channel or portrait for a phone, with the spoken sentence burnt in for silent feeds.
6chapters of the Meridian problem statement made with it, 22 minutes, on our channel
0services it depends on: voices, drawings, maths and rendering all run on the machine it is installed on
5minutes to re make a chapter after a change to one line
Chapter 1 · Four steps, all local
What it does
Each picture is a sentence in the script. A local image model draws it in one house style, so a hundred pictures look like one hand drew them. Photographs and renders drop in the same way.
Every scene is laid out and checked before a frame is rendered: a block that would run long shrinks, a later block moves below an earlier one, and a scene that never shows a word is reported.
Deterministic frames, the narration, the join, the end card. Landscape or portrait from the same script. A chapter in about five minutes.
Chapter 2 · Arguments that change
What it is for
A problem statement for a board. A case study told by the people inside it. A method explained once, properly, so it is not explained badly forty times. Anything where the words are the point, the numbers must be right, and the piece will be revised.
It is not for drama. A film with actors, dialogue and camera coverage is a different craft and a different tool, and we say so.
Chapter 3 · Plainly
What state it is in
The method and the pipeline exist and make our own films. A script editor exists, on our machine, for writing and previewing a piece. What does not yet exist is a thing you can download: the licensed desktop app, with the voices and the drawing engine inside it, is in build, and it will be sold on the same terms as our Chidoodle licences.
So there are two ways to ask. Ask to be told when the app is ready, and you will be. Or ask for a piece to be made with it now, from your words, and we make it: that is a service, delivered as a film, and the first conversation costs nothing.
It is not published, but it exists.
Ask to be told when the app is ready, or ask for a piece made with it now.
Ask about Doodle Reader