AI Comic Books with Duco

Episode Description

Duco (Erik Edwards) joins Anthony Campolo and Dev Agrawal to build USS Acampo comics with AutoShow, refine reference art, and test character voices.

Episode Summary

Anthony Campolo hosts Erik Edwards, his longtime creative collaborator known as Duco, and Dev Agrawal for a detailed look at USS Acampo, an AI-assisted comic set aboard a space fabrication shop inspired by Star Trek: Lower Decks, workplace comedy, and Edwards’s experiences in manufacturing. Edwards explains how creative writing became a year-long project, while Campolo describes AutoShow’s script-to-panel workflow: screenplay dialogue and directions become structured JSON, beats, character and location references, image prompts, and generated panels. The discussion distinguishes creating with AI from simply generating with it, emphasizing human judgment, iteration, continuity checks, and the limits of fully AI-written scripts. They review reference assets, voice-model experiments, CLI commands, image editing, soundtrack ideas, and a rough character-playback demo. Edwards and Agrawal identify inconsistent art styles, overly realistic backgrounds, character continuity errors, and visual references that look copy-pasted. They propose redesigning assets and using generated images to guide the reference style. Campolo outlines a browser workflow and the remaining work needed to turn panels into animated video. Concept albums suggest possible source material for adaptations, before the group closes with season-one progress, future episode ideas, and an invitation for feedback.

Speakers

• Anthony Campolo
• Erik Edwards
• Dev Agrawal
• Demo Voice
• Character Playback

Demo Voice and Character Playback identify generated audio played during the demonstrations, separate from the three people in the conversation.

Chapters

00:00:02 - Introducing Erik and USS Acampo

Anthony Campolo welcomes Erik Edwards, a friend and creative collaborator of 15 years, to discuss USS Acampo. Edwards explains that he began experimenting with creative writing and, with Campolo’s help, turned the material into an AI-generated comic project. He describes the show as a low-stakes workplace comedy in space, built around two friends making something for fun rather than a commercial production.

The opening also establishes the project’s practical motivation: AI tools let people with ideas but limited artistic or production skills create a finished artifact. Campolo notes that the models, especially for text and consistent characters, have improved substantially during the roughly year-long effort. Edwards and Campolo frame the project as an ongoing creative collaboration.

00:02:22 - AI Art, Access, and Human Judgment

Dev Agrawal offers a pragmatic view of AI art, saying it lowers the barrier for ordinary users who need banners, posters, or other small marketing materials without hiring an artist. He argues that this accessibility does not mean AI should wholesale replace human artists. Comparing the trend with software engineering, he expects some work to move to AI while overall demand may still create more opportunities.

Edwards agrees, explaining that he would hire artists if the project supported that, but AI gives two nonprofessional creators a way to build something themselves. He uses language models mainly as scaffolding: checking continuity, character voice, jokes, and relationships among existing notes. Campolo similarly favors narrow, iterative tasks over asking a model to create an entire polished work in one pass.

00:07:31 - Creating with AI Versus Generating with AI

Campolo distinguishes between generating with AI and creating with AI. He compares a one-sentence music prompt, where a system writes lyrics and music, with supplying lyrics, selecting a style, and revising the resulting track. In his view, iteration keeps the human involved as the person deciding what the work should mean, how it should sound, and which generated ideas are worth retaining.

Dev compares the distinction with AI-assisted development versus vibe coding. Campolo agrees that repeated review and refinement are central, while Edwards admits the terminology is new to him but describes the back-and-forth process in practical terms. The group concludes that models are useful when a creator narrows the task, evaluates the output, and remains the arbiter of the finished art.

00:09:52 - The USS Acampo Universe and Its Influences

Edwards explains that USS Acampo began as Star Trek-adjacent fan fiction, but replaces Star Trek’s optimistic social structure with a universe where capitalism has prevailed. Its medium-sized ship houses roughly eight or nine people who operate a fabrication and welding shop. Their commissions turn into absurd workplace problems, such as designing a nonlethal torpedo or trying to satisfy a boss who gives contradictory instructions about a logo. Edwards draws on his experience making agricultural equipment to keep the situations recognizable.

They compare influences, from Dev’s interest in Marvel, DC, The Boys, and time-travel stories to Edwards’s enthusiasm for Lower Decks and Dragon Ball. Edwards credits Lower Decks with introducing him to Star Trek and describes its affectionate, referential comedy. Campolo compares the crew’s odd jobs with Firefly. These examples establish the intended mix of science fiction, ensemble relationships, and ordinary workplace frustrations.

00:16:40 - From Screenplay to Structured Comic Panels

Campolo begins a screen-share walkthrough with Edwards’s script. Character dialogue, scene directions, and visual instructions are extracted into structured beats, which become panel plans. Lines from Duco and Seamus demonstrate how the system connects a speaker, emotional delivery, location, and visual description. A sequence of four panels alternates between characters while preserving each line’s relationship to its image and eventual voice track.

Dev summarizes the approach as a timeline of story beats represented in JSON, giving later generation a concrete structure instead of jumping directly from an idea to finished images. Edwards says the explanation helps him understand how the project is assembled. The pair explain why comics became a useful intermediate format: panels serve as storyboards and provide something they can review while developing the later animation workflow.

00:25:05 - Reference Assets and Visual Continuity

Campolo explains that each panel combines the script’s description with reference images for its characters and location. He shows repository assets for Duco, other crew members, the mess hall, and the ship, establishing the visual setting of a fabrication and machine shop in space. Edwards cautions that many designs remain placeholders. He cites the silhouette test for animated ensembles and says several characters need redesign so viewers can tell them apart.

Dev asks how reference work and panel generation affect one another. Campolo says the needed character and location references should exist before generating a scene, but the team repeatedly revises them. A coffee cup accidentally became a persistent prop because it appeared in a character’s original reference image. Two characters also looked too similar in age, hair, and uniform color. These examples show why reference assets require ongoing review rather than a single generation pass.

00:30:31 - AutoShow CLI and Panel Generation

Campolo identifies the commands behind the workflow as part of the AutoShow CLI, which he has been developing for about two years. Given a script, the system can extract structured elements, combine them with character and location references, and send the resulting prompt to an image model. Users can select aspect ratios such as widescreen, square, or tall, choose image quality, and set a repair count for automated review.

The tool can run from script to panels, but a fully automatic pass makes many decisions about characters, locations, and visual design. Separate commands allow creators to generate and review references first, then produce panels with more control. Campolo says the process currently requires substantial manual CLI work, though the broader goal is to make the workflow accessible through AutoShow itself.

00:36:34 - Shot Plans, Dialogue, and Character Voices

Campolo walks through examples in which screenplay directions become visual shot plans. A character taking bread from an oven receives details about clothing, camera position, and emotional tone, while a group scene specifies where the crew stands or sits. Dialogue identifies the speaker and the text that will feed the voice system. Montage shots can expose missing location references, and Edwards explains why descriptions must preserve each character’s appearance.

Each character will receive a reference voice as well as a reference image, but Campolo and Edwards have not yet chosen the final performances. Campolo mentions Inworld as a promising option. Dev asks whether voices should imitate the people who inspired the characters, prompting Edwards to distinguish vocal timbre from written mannerisms. He describes exaggerated personality traits and workplace incidents as starting points for consistent fictional voices and episode ideas.

00:42:01 - A Full Demo and the Limits of AI-Written Scripts

Campolo prepares an end-to-end demonstration that starts with a separate script, generates panels, and assembles them with synthetic voices. A short demo exchange about an AI livestream includes jokes about agents, image generation, hallucinations, and a talking lamp. The voices illustrate how the pipeline can connect dialogue to a sequence of generated visuals, even though the source material is deliberately generic.

Campolo openly criticizes the script as poor, arguing that the output sounds like the kind of material produced when an AI is asked to write from scratch. Edwards finds a few attempted jokes in the scene but agrees that the result is not a model for USS Acampo. The example reinforces their central point: the system can automate production steps, but interesting writing still needs a strong human concept and editorial judgment.

00:44:08 - Panel Review and Musical Timing

The conversation shifts to revising actual USS Acampo panels. Edwards selects an episode-five scene and works with Campolo to locate the correct panel, while Campolo explains that their normal process is to generate an initial batch, place it in a shared document, and collect notes. Edwards’s feedback includes a continuity detail: a character should not have a missing tooth yet because that injury occurs later in the episode.

Edwards also explains that a montage is intended to accompany Todd Rundgren’s “Bang the Drum All Day.” A rough character-playback example combines an image sequence, dialogue, and song lyrics, giving Dev a preview of how the comic could become an audiovisual piece. The team treats music, panel timing, and story continuity as connected editorial choices rather than automatic byproducts of image generation.

00:49:15 - Animation Plans and Directed Image Edits

Dev asks whether the comic could become a motion comic or animated production. Campolo describes combining lip-sync models, character images, generated speech, and image-to-video models. AutoShow contains the necessary components, but the final integration remains unfinished. An initial version might be quick to connect, while making it look good would take much longer. The team also needs voices that fit the characters; Edwards recalls a slow voice assigned to a particularly talkative character.

Campolo demonstrates how AutoShow can modify an existing panel with targeted instructions and reference images. Edwards checks story continuity, asks for Paddy’s missing tooth to be restored, and requests a lotus platform for Gulp. Their workflow alternates generated panels with specific editorial notes until the images fit the story. Campolo also recommends having a coding agent operate the CLI, explaining that it has made the iterative process easier than manually entering every command.

00:56:41 - Visual Style, Consistency, and Reference Images

Edwards celebrates a successful duck-dragon image that captured a deliberately strange description, while Dev raises a broader concern: some panels place characters with a stylized look against backgrounds that feel more realistic. Edwards agrees that certain characters appear to have been drawn in different visual universes, and Campolo notes that the model can add excessive detail.

The team considers whether the problem comes from the location references, which may be too clean or too realistic, or from the way generated images over-index on supplied examples. They discuss redesigning characters, simplifying backgrounds without making them flat, and revisiting early assumptions. Edwards observes that the workshop setting became overly cluttered after the team tried to make it feel lived in, creating a new style problem to correct.

01:00:41 - Revising Scene Assumptions and Background References

Campolo revisits an early rule that limits each panel to one speaking character. It may simplify later voice and video production, but Edwards points out scenes where several characters should speak together or share a speech bubble. Dev suggests generating a background from a character reference first, then using that result to bring the canonical location reference into the same visual style. They also find a scene that should occur in the fabrication bay rather than the lower-deck hallway.

The group reviews the lotus-platform edit and finds that the supplied reference looks pasted into the composition. Edwards proposes a holographic platform that fits Gulp’s established skills and could make the scene funnier. Campolo considers either asking the image model to blend the reference more naturally or adopting the holographic idea. Edwards notes that Gulp’s intoxication could also leave the audience unsure whether the event is real or reflects his viewpoint.

01:06:12 - Animal Personas During a Rendering Break

While the image renders, Edwards asks Dev about an animal persona, leading to an improvised discussion of the question and the stream’s boundaries. Campolo reframes it as choosing an animal to identify with. Dev compares the interruption to a request being moved between language models, turning the exchange into another AI-related joke.

Campolo uses Animorphs as an example of transforming into animals. Dev eventually chooses a cat and describes himself as lazy, while Edwards emphasizes a cat’s ability to pounce or show its claws. The conversation remains a relaxed detour from the production walkthrough before the group returns to AutoShow features and the comic’s future.

01:09:51 - AutoShow’s Web App and Automatic Shows

Dev asks what features from this project should become part of AutoShow. Campolo says the CLI and web app should ultimately have parity, with the CLI serving as a place to build and test capabilities before moving them into the front end. His preferred interface would accept a script, generate character and location references, show the results, and let a creator describe corrections in plain language.

The same review loop would then apply to panels and eventually video. Edwards recalls that AutoShow originally referred to automatic show notes, while the current project suggests a reverse direction: using notes or other source material to create a show. Campolo says the system could start with an existing concept, album, or other structured content, because a meaningful baseline gives the model more to work with than a blank prompt.

01:12:20 - Concept Albums and Story Structure

Campolo suggests converting an existing album into a script and then passing it through the comic and animation pipeline. He cites The Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come for Free as a narrative about everyday events, friendships, and a missing sum of money. Edwards suggests Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories and imagines a visual sequel to Interstella 5555, while acknowledging that the album is not a conventional continuous story. These examples give a model something developed to work from instead of asking it to invent a complete script without guidance.

Dev proposes Dream Theater’s Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory and Queensrÿche’s Operation: Mindcrime. He describes the former’s acts, scenes, regression therapy, past murder, and repeating tragedy. Edwards asks about Dev’s interest in progressive rock, unusual rhythms, and story progression. They discuss staying in touch and briefly detour into social media before returning to the status of USS Acampo.

01:19:10 - Season One, Feedback, and Upcoming Streams

Campolo brings the discussion toward a closing recap. Edwards says season one is planned for eight episodes, with seven written to a stage he considers ready and the opening episode being rewritten. Season two is outlined, while a possible movie remains tentative. He pitches another story about a lonely character who falls for an embodied language model, but says finishing the first season comes first. Dev looks forward to reading the comic and seeing the eventual animated video with spoken dialogue.

Edwards asks Campolo to share the panels with Dev so he can provide feedback on the writing and continuity. The group reflects on their friendship and the project’s role as a source of creative and technical problems. Closing announcements preview a Remix 3 conversation with Brooks Lybrand and a stream with Campolo’s former QuickNode colleague Carl DiClementi about his AI-related project. They thank viewers and leave open the possibility of another visit as the comic progresses.

Resources and Links

• AutoShow CLI
• Suno
• Inworld AI
• OpenAI image generation

Transcript

00:00:02 - Anthony Campolo

Hello everyone, welcome to very special episode edition of AJC and the Web Devs with Anthony's old friend for 15 years now, Erik Edwards. Yep. Hey guys,

00:00:17 - Erik Edwards

thanks for having me.

00:00:18 - Anthony Campolo

College and are still my best friend now, so thanks for being on the stream. This is gonna be really, really fun. Uh, yeah, we played in bands and stuff, but, um, I'll let you introduce yourself. Say as much or as little as you'd like.

00:00:30 - Erik Edwards

Cool. Yeah, no, I'm Erik Edwards. We played in bands and stuff. Um, no, I've always been doing stuff with Anthony, like, creatively for a long time. But, um, why am I— I'm here because of the stuff we do, right?

00:00:42 - Anthony Campolo

Yep, because of USS Acampo.

00:00:44 - Erik Edwards

Yeah. Okay, so a while ago I decided I wanted to try creative writing. And, um, oh, I like that. Who's Fozzie?

00:00:52 - Anthony Campolo

That's a fuzzy bear. Fuzzy Bear is our number one, number one listener.

00:00:57 - Erik Edwards

Oh, hey Fuzzy Bear. I like your little like icon. Anyway, sorry.

00:01:00 - Anthony Campolo

He's Scottish. You two would love each other.

00:01:03 - Erik Edwards

Ooh. Ooh.

00:01:04 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah.

00:01:05 - Erik Edwards

Um, what was, okay. So anyway, then anyway, I just started doing some creative writing. I talked to Anthony about it and he was like, hey, you could do something with this. And so I had to write more and we started doing like this AI generative pipeline thing to like create these comics. And it's just, uh, kind of like a workplace comedy in space. Really low stakes, kind of stupid, dumb humor. Not everyone's cup of tea, but I really just like making things with people, you know? So yeah, that's my spiel. Sorry.

00:01:34 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, I was stoked when you told me about it cuz at this point, this was over a year ago, I think, or maybe about a year ago. And so there we are still on GPT Image 1 or 1.5. And like at that point, just getting it to do like text and stuff like that and like have consistent characters and all that. Was still really hard because the models were not that good yet. But as we've kind of done this, we've refined what we've been doing and the models have gotten better at the same time, which has been really nice.

00:02:04 - Erik Edwards

We should have thought about this beforehand. Do you have any of like the original generations lying around?

00:02:11 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, yeah,

00:02:12 - Erik Edwards

yeah. Like that might be a good thing to show later, like some of the original crap. Oh yeah, some of my phones. So while you're looking up stuff and talking, I can pull some up and send them to you too anyway. Sorry to interrupt.

00:02:22 - Anthony Campolo

Anyway, I want to bring Dev in on this. So yeah, I mean, what's your thoughts on like AI art or any of this kind of stuff?

00:02:32 - Dev Agrawal

Man, I wish I like I did enough art or I was creative enough to feel like I should have an opinion on this because I feel like I'm the furthest thing from an artist. Like when I write code, I don't really think about it as art. And I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I like that it has reduced the floor to like what someone can do without having a lot of like artistic skills. Like I talked to my mom, she used to have to like hire people or pay people to get like banners and posters, kind of stuff like that done for her. Now she just talks to Gemini a bunch and gets that done. And it's not like it's— these are the things that they need, like, I don't know, like perfect, like human creativity for. It's like just a marketing, like a small piece of marketing.

00:03:40 - Anthony Campolo

Oh, we lost Dev for a moment. Since he's back in India, sometimes he'll pop. And at his internet, we'll just decide they're gonna take a 10-second break and come back.

00:03:50 - Erik Edwards

We'll be right back. And then the technical difficulties sign with like a dog accidentally pulling the— oh, he's back. Okay. I saw him move. Oh,

00:03:56 - Dev Agrawal

I'm back. Uh, where did I, where did you guys lose me?

00:04:01 - Anthony Campolo

Uh, like 30 seconds.

00:04:02 - Erik Edwards

Your mom's making banners and it's not like it's creative, right?

00:04:07 - Dev Agrawal

Yeah. So it's like, it's a, it's a piece of marketing material. So I feel like there are places where it definitely helps reduce some barriers, but then obviously like it shouldn't be or it cannot be something that just like wholesale replaces the need for human artists. In fact, I think eventually it's gonna do— it's probably gonna be something similar to what happens with software engineering where yes, some work is going to move from the humans to the AI, But ultimately the demand is always going to be so high that you're just going to end up with more jobs rather than less people working. Yeah, that's my thoughts on like the— I don't know, less about the creative and artistic side and more about the economic side of that.

00:05:05 - Erik Edwards

Word, word. Can I, can I like go off of that? Because I actually agree with you.

00:05:08 - Dev Agrawal

Yes, please.

00:05:10 - Erik Edwards

If I could like hire actual artists to do this, I would do that, you know what I mean? Like, but I'm not an actual good writer, you know what I mean? This is just 2 friends make, so it's, it's a tool that allows us to do it. It's not like this is a commercial product, you know what I mean? And I don't think actually AI is a good replacement for a lot of people on creative projects. I think it can be used for like scaffolding. I think it can be really helpful if like you're doing a one-person thing. Like you guys probably use like whatever your LLM of choice is, right? For like notes and shit.

00:05:45 - Anthony Campolo

Like what kind of notes?

00:05:47 - Erik Edwards

Well, okay, maybe not. I don't know. Like I'll use like a whole chat just to kind of instead of like writing for me, its whole job is I write in the chat and then it checks against like other like continuity that I've written before. It makes sure, like, I'll be like, okay, what do you think about this in this character's voice compared to all the other things I've written? Like, is this the wrong character to say this line? You know, like stuff like that. Is this joke making sense in the context of like what we already know? And it's really good at like pulling data and stuff from stuff I've already written, but it's really bad, I think, at like creating stuff. In fact, when I ask it to create stuff, it's usually to be like, no, that's bad. I can do better here. This is better. I don't know if it's actually better though.

00:06:33 - Anthony Campolo

Oh no, we lost.

00:06:34 - Erik Edwards

Oh man.

00:06:36 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, I think, uh, there's— you can use AI to kind of like generate an end-to-end script and have it write the whole thing, and then it's gonna kind of be weird, just gonna sound like AI, you know. But you can kind of use it as a tool to kind of go through, you know, a script that you're writing and then actually come up with interesting ideas, but then you're still kind of the arbiter of what do you actually want the thing, the art to be about, you know? So I think the more you can kind of scope it down, the more AI can become useful as like a tool instead of a thing that just you want to get like a one-shot kind of out of. Like we, yeah, keep scoping it down so you can really refine each step.

00:07:17 - Erik Edwards

Oh, definitely. And like for longer things, like some of these documents get to be like, you know, 50, 60 pages of writing. And it can't do that. At least I haven't seen it be able to output anything quality at that length that makes any sense.

00:07:31 - Anthony Campolo

So Fuzzy, what you asked is what I was trying to actually express. So I'm glad you said that. So what I was generating with AI, I would say, is trying to just get the AI to do as much as possible. So the example would be like in Suno, you can just give a single sentence prompt of like what you want the song to mean. It will write the lyrics and will come up with the music versus you could write the lyrics yourself and then also select the styles and then have it create a song that then you could go in and edit and create, you know, modifications or expand certain sections. So I would say the more you're doing that, you're creating with AI versus generating with AI. I don't think there's anything wrong with generating with AI either. Like what Erik's saying, you know, we're doing this Mostly just for fun and because we want to make something that we think will be good. But even for people who just want to do it because they can have the fun of being able to, like, just create a song because, like, most people who love music don't have the ability to play an instrument and they always wish they could. So it's like, it's a great thing. That's more iterating.

00:08:39 - Dev Agrawal

Is this the same as, is this the same as, like, AI-assisted development versus vibe coding? Creating with AI and generating with AI.

00:08:50 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, no, that's probably a good comparison. I mean, it, yeah, iterating, I would say iterating with AI and creating with AI, I would say are basically the same thing. So

00:09:03 - Erik Edwards

I don't know the differences between those words.

00:09:07 - Anthony Campolo

So

00:09:08 - Erik Edwards

I'm sorry, you gotta remember I'm the least qualified person to ever be on your stream, dude.

00:09:12 - Anthony Campolo

It's when you basically go over. So like when we have a script with a bunch of episodes, we'll iterate on it. So we'll go through it. You'll give me some notes. I'll come back with new ones. You'll give me some more notes. We'll come back with it. That's iterating. You're muted.

00:09:31 - Erik Edwards

I'm not good at the computers yet, actually. Maybe I shouldn't.

00:09:37 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, I usually mute myself when I'm not talking, so I totally get it. Don't worry.

00:09:40 - Erik Edwards

Well, I'm trying to because, you know, I can be loud.

00:09:42 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. Okay. Um, actually, Erik, could you just explain briefly, like, the universe of the show and the characters so that people have context when they're seeing the images?

00:09:52 - Erik Edwards

Okay. So I was thinking it's very similar to, like, hmm. Okay. It started as Star Trek fan fiction, kind of like Star Trek adjacent fan fiction. Um, but instead of having, um, kind of a nice socialist utopia worldscape, it's just capitalism won everything. So this is The place that did the USS Acampo is a small ship, a medium-sized ship. It's got a crew of like 8, 9 people, and they're basically a fabrication and welding shop in space. So they take on random orders from people, like some people want, you know, um, stronger boosters on their ship. Maybe somebody wants like a type of torpedo, and they take commissions from people and they produce results for them. And it's really based off of my work because I work at a place that doesn't make weapons. We make agricultural equipment, but we do— my boy, my person, thank you. Like, I think the very first episode, which we're rewriting now because we did all the other ones, is about somebody asks him to build a torpedo, but legally they can't, so they have to figure out how to make a non-lethal torpedo. That will like be able to be fired but also like not hurt anybody. Um, and it's just kind of stupid situations. Like, I like a lot of, um, obscure comedy. Like, Anthony, we watched a bunch of really stupid cartoons this weekend. I like, uh, YOLO Crystal Fantasy is one that I love, and it's random,

00:11:22 - Anthony Campolo

crazy,

00:11:24 - Erik Edwards

but like the randomness has a point also, you know? Like, all the stupid jokes weave around and they somehow land, and I'm like, I'm not saying that I'm anywhere near as good as Cusack is at that, but That's kind of what I aspire to be. But I also try to keep it kind of grounded in a way that makes it at least somewhat relatable to like—

00:11:46 - Anthony Campolo

it reminds me of just like a workplace comedy for sure.

00:11:49 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, no, I tried it. Like one episode is about one man slowly going insane because his boss wants a new logo and he wants to do a good job on the logo, but the boss is giving him contradictory advice every time he comes in. Like, I don't know if any of you have had a boss that like does not know what they want. I have a couple times. I think that's a pretty relatable experience. So it's— I try to put the absurdity in situations like that. So that's kind of the show.

00:12:19 - Anthony Campolo

Dev, what kind of shows do you like?

00:12:22 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, I want to know.

00:12:25 - Dev Agrawal

That's a great question. I don't know, I've been pretty deep into all the superhero stuff from like Marvel and DC. Um, outside of that, I don't know, I don't really spend a lot of time watching shows. I feel like I spend more time watching random conference talks on YouTube and 5-hour Ryan Carniato streams. Um, yeah, I think mostly superhero style.

00:12:51 - Anthony Campolo

Such a better way to spend your time, honestly.

00:12:56 - Erik Edwards

I mean, I'm not saying what you guys do is bad.

00:12:58 - Anthony Campolo

I think it's good to have a little bit of both. Honestly, yeah.

00:13:01 - Erik Edwards

So you, you wouldn't have any opinion, Dev, on like Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball Super, Dragon Ball Daima, which I thought was very enjoyable?

00:13:12 - Dev Agrawal

I don't know what the last one of this—

00:13:15 - Erik Edwards

it's the one where Goku got turned into a kid, man. It's like the newest season. I, I'll send you a link. I'll send you a link.

00:13:23 - Dev Agrawal

What

00:13:25 - Dev Agrawal

are you talking about? GT?

00:13:26 - Erik Edwards

No, we're not talking about GT, dude. Nobody talks about GT. No, it's like the— I'll send you a link. I'll send you a link to a place where you can watch them totally cool later.

00:13:38 - Dev Agrawal

Definitely. Okay.

00:13:39 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Don't go to WCO.

00:13:41 - Anthony Campolo

That was your favorite. Give us your favorite shows in the chat. Cool.

00:13:49 - Dev Agrawal

I mean, I recently watched The Boys. I guess another similar Similarly, like the superhero genre, superhero-ish genre, there wasn't a lot of superheroing in there. But yeah, it, uh, that was fun.

00:14:02 - Anthony Campolo

It's a subversive superhero show because the superheroes are the bad guys, right?

00:14:08 - Erik Edwards

Okay, so I wanted to watch that show, but I haven't yet because I'm really— because I read part of the comic book.

00:14:14 - Anthony Campolo

Watch The Boys, dude.

00:14:15 - Erik Edwards

No, no, it's really bloody, it looks like. I don't like

00:14:20 - Anthony Campolo

Okay, so I've only seen the first season, so I have no idea what happens after that, but the first season— oh no, it is awesome. This is a super, super good show.

00:14:28 - Erik Edwards

Okay, so you're like, it's great, and the devs over here on the other side, like, I don't know if anyone else can see. Oh, here we go. Oh dude, okay, Star Trek. I'll be honest, I didn't get into Star Trek until recently, man. Um, Lower Decks got me into Star Trek. Oh, and then I just read this book. I don't know, Fuzzy, do you like reading? There's this book I just read called Red Shirts, and it's kind of Star Trek adjacent. It's super easy to read. It's like 180 pages. I fucking love— oops, sorry to swear. I really enjoyed it.

00:14:59 - Anthony Campolo

You're allowed to swear. Don't worry.

00:15:01 - Erik Edwards

That's fine.

00:15:04 - Dev Agrawal

Heck yeah. I do like, like sci-fi and time travel stuff. So 2 of my favorite TV shows are, uh, one of them is Legends of Tomorrow from DC. It's like a spinoff of Flash and Green Arrow.

00:15:16 - Erik Edwards

Uh, okay.

00:15:17 - Dev Agrawal

And then the other, the other one is Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which they did a lot of great, like, time travel stuff in their last, last few seasons.

00:15:26 - Erik Edwards

Is that the one with the character Jimmy Woo?

00:15:30 - Dev Agrawal

Uh, no, Jimmy Woo,

00:15:32 - Erik Edwards

by the way, Fuzzy. Lower Decks is fucking great. Sorry to interrupt that.

00:15:35 - Anthony Campolo

Keep going. I was gonna say, explain Lower Decks because that was the inspiration for this, right?

00:15:39 - Erik Edwards

Okay, yeah, so Lower Decks is like a cartoon in the Star Trek universe, and it takes place like the lower decks are like the lower-ranked officers and stuff. So, um, and it's just kind of a tongue-in-cheek, um, it makes fun of Star Trek and what's going on, but it does it in such a way that's referential and it still like exists in the Star Trek universe. It's just a funny Star Trek cartoon.

00:16:02 - Anthony Campolo

It's all right. I think Fuzzy is gonna freaking love this, dude. It sounds like this is like made just for him.

00:16:08 - Erik Edwards

I hope so. Like, I've been told by some people it's kind of red dwarfish, but I've never seen red dwarfs, so I don't know.

00:16:15 - Anthony Campolo

I just realized this recently, but to me it actually reminds me of Firefly, which is, um, a sci-fi TV show where it's like a crew of people who are all kind of assembled together to do like odd jobs and stuff in like a decentralized space-based universe.

00:16:29 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, and I loved Firefly, man. Like, that was a— yeah, that was a— that was a great episode TV and then one movie. Oh, okay. Yeah, let's get into this. Let's get into this.

00:16:40 - Anthony Campolo

Sorry, let me pop this off real quick. So, first off, I'm going to show some examples of some panels, and then we'll kind of walk through the whole pipeline after that. I think that will make more sense.

00:16:55 - Erik Edwards

Okay. So, are we doing that thing we talked about where we're just going to show how we, like, revise panels?

00:16:59 - Anthony Campolo

Not yet. We will.

00:17:01 - Erik Edwards

Okay. Okay. You're in charge. Sorry, you're Batman. I'm Robin. Holy smokes, Catman.

00:17:06 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. Okay. So this is an example of kind of how it is something like this generated. So we have an image here is kind of what we're going for. So, sorry, let me step back actually. The thing we start with is the script. So Erik has a script. So the script over here, it's, we have montage deep inside cramped access chute. He— I'm sorry. So this is panel 7 of 13. So this part of the script is here. So he's outside the hole working on the transport array. Stars and beautiful gas giant behind him, completely focused on his work, ignoring the scenery around him. And then that gets turned into what's called a beat, which is then get turned into a panel. Let me actually start at the top. It's gonna make more sense. So, So, here we have the script is going to look something like this. For people who've never read a script before, it usually includes the character dialogue is kind of like the central part of it. So, always have a character's name, the dialogue they're saying, and then there'll be scene directions around that, which can explain either like what's happening in the story visually or how it should be framed. And then this is all kind of extracted out so that you then have the speakers are identified. So we have a line from Duco here saying, you good? And then Seamus saying, how are you so calm? And then here where it says distantly, and let me pop this up just a little bit. Oh, I know what the issue is. I need to make this wider. There we go. There we go. Okay. And let me pop that off. Okay, cool. Dev, does this make sense to you?

00:19:03 - Dev Agrawal

Yeah, I mean, that's— I haven't done like any sort of like comic book production, but yeah, this is how I would kind of imagine it would be like. Yes. Yeah.

00:19:13 - Anthony Campolo

And this is essentially how I have been trying to extract out the things needed from the script to get to a comic book. So it's not really a comic book thing. This is like a film screenplay kind of thing. But what we do from there is, let's see, that gets turned into like a structured JSON, which then identifies the character. So the character here is Seamus. The delivery is, this is for the, when we get to the voice models, you can give instructions for how they should sound like emotionally when they speak. And so that makes a big difference in terms of when you get to that final voice part. And then there's a location key because every part has to map to a certain location. And we have reference images for all the different locations and all the different characters. So this gets all kind of assembled together into a big prompt. How the prompt works is not Super important right now. Did you have a question, Erik?

00:20:20 - Erik Edwards

No, I just everybody's sharing all these good shows.

00:20:23 - Anthony Campolo

Brooklyn Nine-Nine is one of my favorites too. Me and Jeff. I didn't want to interrupt you. Season five right now.

00:20:29 - Erik Edwards

Everybody's sharing good shows. Okay, I'm going back to mute. Continue, please.

00:20:34 - Anthony Campolo

Yep. Okay. Do do do do do. Okay, so here we have, actually, okay, this is, this part is what we should look at. So here then, this is 4 panels, which is made up of first one is Duco saying, you good? And then the second one goes to Seamus saying, why are you so calm? And then it goes back to Duco and then it goes back to Seamus. This then lets you connect the individual comic panel with the specific character and voice, which we'll see at the very— the way all this ends up, where you can kind of create this effect where you can just show each image with the voice kind of going along with it. So I think I'm actually going to Pull up one of those that we can show. That's gonna take me a couple minutes. So could you guys fill some space while I do that and give Dev response to this or Erik?

00:21:47 - Erik Edwards

Dev.

00:21:47 - Anthony Campolo

Talk about whatever else you'd like.

00:21:51 - Erik Edwards

I'm filling space.

00:21:52 - Dev Agrawal

Literally filling with drum fills.

00:21:55 - Erik Edwards

Okay, I do like how what you ended up choosing for your example. Example was the cannibalism speech. Thank you for that. That's really cool. That is not really what the show is about, nor do I condone cannibalism.

00:22:09 - Anthony Campolo

That's really funny.

00:22:12 - Erik Edwards

I want to know.

00:22:12 - Dev Agrawal

So what I've—

00:22:14 - Erik Edwards

oh, go ahead.

00:22:14 - Dev Agrawal

That's right, go ahead.

00:22:16 - Erik Edwards

Or you, you,

00:22:18 - Dev Agrawal

uh, okay. I was just, I guess, uh, yeah, just a summer, uh, summarizing everything that I understood so far. Um, so you start with whatever the initial idea is and you turn it into basically a timeline of story beats. And story beats are either dialogue or directions. And then you have, you get panels generated that are associated with, with like some group of story beats within that, the whole story. So you're not just going from like here's the kind of story I want to make, go generate the panels. You're doing this kind of like structured process where you first, first have this entire timeline and then you like literally create JSON objects for them and then you use that to kind of like ground everything, which yeah, I really like that kind of that process there.

00:23:13 - Erik Edwards

He's really good at explaining this because you've never shown me— like, I didn't know this is how it was made, man. Like, it's like getting to see the sausage being like thrown through and like I finally understand it a little bit.

00:23:26 - Anthony Campolo

Awesome. Sorry, I was gonna write—

00:23:28 - Dev Agrawal

so how many— what, what kind of comic books? Like, uh, or I guess, I guess how long have you guys been doing this?

00:23:35 - Erik Edwards

About like a year, I think, actually. Um, and like, it's— it started as, um, because we, we decided to kind of do comic books because we figured that we would have to do like What do you call it? Storyboarding anyway. So it was kind of like a nice medium. And like, we— I figured that like, even if we don't get to animation, because I don't think that there's a lot of good—

00:23:59 - Anthony Campolo

at this point, the video models are definitely good enough for us to be able to turn this into animation without much more extra.

00:24:04 - Erik Edwards

Okay. Because like NeuralViz is doing some kick-ass shit, dude. Like NeuralViz is doing some really good— like, that's some good AI. Like most of the AI crap I see is just like, like Oh, I haven't found it since I showed you, Dev. I was watching YouTube with ads on because I don't have YouTube Premium, and this 7-minute and 30-second commercial for like this garlic powder came on that was this whole storyline set to music about how this guy was a gardener and like he ended up sleeping with one of the rich people's wives, and she told him that like the family lived forever because they ate garlic, and like this is why you should buy this garlic product. And it was like 7 and a half minutes of just AI slop bullshit. And it was amazing. If I find it, I'll put it on. Like, I sent some videos to Anthony. I was just like, dude, you have— this is what we can't be when we go to animation. We can't be this.

00:25:02 - Anthony Campolo

Okay. Let's try to get that screen to—

00:25:04 - Erik Edwards

ooh, he's got something.

00:25:05 - Anthony Campolo

Chat, but oh well. Okay. So that's it. While that's generating, I'm going to just keep, keep going through this. So Um, so the panels become basically a bundle that then you can generate each panel kind of one by one. Uh, let's see here. So here's the image pipeline. So actually, yeah, so panel is kind of assembled from all that JSON stuff before. And then what it does is since it connects to the characters in the location for each individual panel, it has now the description that was, that came from the script and includes the characters and the locations. And then it actually grabs the reference images itself from the repo. So there's like JPEGs in or WebP or whatever. In the files for each of the different characters. Let me actually show that. Probably help explain this a bit for dev.

00:26:15 - Dev Agrawal

So you're muted.

00:26:16 - Erik Edwards

Oh, sorry. Any assets we may or may not show you are total, like, placeholders at this point. We got to redesign some characters. We got some really good advice this weekend. So, uh, gotta go back to the drawing board on a couple of them. You know, like this silhouette test. If you have an animated, like, ensemble, you should be able to tell each one from a silhouette. And, uh, we're not passing that rule right now. So, uh, there's a character.

00:26:40 - Anthony Campolo

So this is Duco. That's Erik in the show. And then—

00:26:45 - Erik Edwards

no, it's not a self-insert.

00:26:47 - Anthony Campolo

And we got some other guys like this, like that. So this is the reference for the characters, and then there's a reference image for the locations. So actually, let's go. So this is the mess hall. We're actually going to see this.

00:27:05 - Erik Edwards

Ooh, do you have the ship?

00:27:08 - Anthony Campolo

We do have the ship somewhere. Let's see.

00:27:12 - Anthony Campolo

That's

00:27:16 - Erik Edwards

okay.

00:27:17 - Anthony Campolo

Where are the ships? There's the ship,

00:27:20 - Erik Edwards

right? There's the ship, but it's still— yeah, yeah. It's a Yeah, that's the ship. There you go. That gives you an idea of the size of it. And like, there's people on board and shit. It's basically like a gigantic fabrication slash machine shop in space. Anyway, sorry to interrupt.

00:27:40 - Dev Agrawal

So when you're, uh, when you're making these, um, like, how do you— how often do you switch between like working on the panels versus working on these assets? Like, do you first just sit and do all the assets and then you move on to like building the panels? Or is it like sometimes when you're trying to describe what the panels would look like, you realize that, oh, this is sort of a shared location that I might want to— I want an asset for. Then you go back, you first do the asset, then you come back to the panel. Like, what does that process look

00:28:16 - Dev Agrawal

like?

00:28:16 - Erik Edwards

Chaotic sometimes.

00:28:18 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, so at this point, you always want to start with, before you're going to generate any of the scene panels, you need to have a reference image for every location character that you're going to need for that specific one. So you start with that and then you can kind of just iterate on the panels once you have the reference images. Does that make sense?

00:28:39 - Dev Agrawal

Yeah, I guess I'm So my question is, do you also iterate on the reference images themselves?

00:28:46 - Erik Edwards

Yes, all the goddamn time. Like when the Paddy coffee cup thing, the Paddy coffee cup.

00:28:52 - Anthony Campolo

Yes, shoot. We watched the first, one of the characters had a coffee cup once in the first reference image. So then every single scene he would be holding a coffee cup. So this is really important actually. Iterating on the reference images is super, super important. So I get your question. Now. And, um,

00:29:09 - Erik Edwards

it happens all the time, dude. All the time.

00:29:12 - Anthony Campolo

Another thing we realized that 2 characters looked very similar. They had like similar hairstyle. They had, they looked similar age and they had like a similar color uniform. And so we'd get confused between the 2 of them. So now we're like making, you know, one of them make it look more distinct than the other.

00:29:27 - Erik Edwards

Like the problem with the characters is like I based them all off people I know. Oh, if we show you some, I bet you, you guys can figure out which one was based off of Anthony.

00:29:38 - Anthony Campolo

Okay, so this, there's also kind of a, this part doesn't really work super well yet, but I'm working on a thing where you can then take the generated image, feed it back to a vision LLM that can then look at it and judge whether it's actually correct or not and find basic continuity errors or things like that. It's not super great, but I believe that it will get good once I kind of spend more time working on it. But, um,

00:30:09 - Erik Edwards

hey, I got a

00:30:10 - Erik Edwards

question. Did you pick that scene specifically?

00:30:13 - Erik Edwards

Or did that—

00:30:14 - Anthony Campolo

I think the scene was somewhere in the documentation for the examples, I think, originally. So that's why it's pulling it in.

00:30:23 - Erik Edwards

Okay, cool. Swear to God, it does not. This is the only time in the entire thing that we talk about cannibalism, and it's a joke, I swear.

00:30:31 - Anthony Campolo

So we see here, these are the actual commands that are generating this. So everything that we're seeing right now, this is all the AutoShow CLI, which I've been working on now for like 2 years. And it basically takes— it can do this whole thing where it starts from the script, creates all those structured JSON things, combines them with the images, and then passes all that together to the image model, which is Right now, ChatGPT Image 2.5 is the newest one. And then you can set the aspect ratio. So this is going to be widescreen. You can also do square or tall. And then quality high, that's for different quality levels with the image model itself. And then max repairs, that's where it goes through the QA step or feeds it back to the vision model. So eventually this will all be in the AutoShow app and anyone will be able to do this. Right now requires a lot of manual CLI stuff, but questions so far?

00:31:38 - Dev Agrawal

Okay, so, so right now you're saying that it's like a bunch of CLI commands that you kind of have to stitch together to go from like an idea to like full comic panels?

00:31:51 - Anthony Campolo

If you have a script, you can go entirely from the script to the panels just with this command, but it's then going to make a lot of decisions for you. It's going to create the reference images for you. It's going to create the location images for you. So there's other commands if you want to go through the process of creating those yourself, reviewing them, iterating them, and then you can start generating the actual panels. But in terms of— it does the whole thing in terms of going from the script, but you have to start with a script. So if you have a script, you can start by asking ChatGPT, hey, write me a script, and then you can have it start creating the panels for you.

00:32:30 - Dev Agrawal

Nice. I might use this to redo the last season of Game of Thrones.

00:32:38 - Anthony Campolo

I like Game of Thrones.

00:32:43 - Dev Agrawal

Uh, there's a bunch of shows or movies that either I don't like the ending or it got canceled for some reason on a cliffhanger, and I would love to fill those gaps, headcanon them.

00:32:56 - Erik Edwards

I want a new Star Wars 9. Like, I just want to redo on 9. I'm cool with keeping 7. I actually love 8. Don't want to fight about this. Don't want to fight about it. Uh, don't, don't@ me. I like 8. Don't want to fight though, but I want to redo on 9 so bad. Ah, anyway,

00:33:20 - Anthony Campolo

I hope I'm just checking out something real quick.

00:33:23 - Erik Edwards

Okay, I don't know. So, so, so, uh, would you— I, I'm gonna needle you a little bit now, Dev. Would you use that power to redo Dragon Ball Super?

00:33:35 - Dev Agrawal

Because I would love me some Super.

00:33:37 - Dev Agrawal

That's a great question. So, um, honestly, I kind of just stopped paying attention to it after some point. I don't think I even finished the Tournament of— was it Tournament of Power?

00:33:51 - Erik Edwards

Uh,

00:33:52 - Dev Agrawal

I might have. I probably finished it.

00:33:55 - Erik Edwards

Did he get the white hair and did like—

00:33:58 - Dev Agrawal

right, okay, no, no, I remember he got— he, he wished the universes back. Something like that.

00:34:04 - Erik Edwards

Because 17's the boy. 17's the boy. He's just, he's just, I don't give a crap. I don't give a crap. Oh, I have a heart. We all knew it, but I'm a little— 17's the boy.

00:34:20 - Dev Agrawal

Yeah, but honestly, yeah, I, I kind of like binged through Super. Um, yeah, I, I didn't like it too much. It was okay. Obviously the animation quality at points, at certain points, was—

00:34:36 - Erik Edwards

and then super smooth. Yeah, no, it was— yeah, well, they're remaking it again, again, again, so hopefully it'll get better, right? Third time's the fucking charm.

00:34:46 - Dev Agrawal

Yeah, it's looking good, but yeah, I don't— like, I, I would have much rather preferred that they take the same amount of resources and write a better— write a newer story. Instead of doing the same exact same story third— for a third time.

00:35:04 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, yeah, you're right. Giant threat, get more powerful, new hair color, kick butt, right? Like, right, cycle repeats. Oh, you're not gonna like the new arc because Vegeta gets a new hair color then. He goes purple.

00:35:20 - Dev Agrawal

Oh, there's a purple though?

00:35:21 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, there's all— because, because Goku's Ultra Instinct and he's Ultra Ego, it's a in the manga, dude. Like, I mean, I'll send you a link for that too.

00:35:31 - Dev Agrawal

Yeah, for sure.

00:35:32 - Erik Edwards

Ooh,

00:35:33 - Dev Agrawal

Anthony, how familiar are you with Dragon Ball Z?

00:35:37 - Anthony Campolo

Me? Me?

00:35:39 - Dev Agrawal

Yeah,

00:35:40 - Anthony Campolo

uh, I never watched Dragon Ball Z as a kid, so I only know— like, I know all the main characters, like, you know, Goku, Vegeta,

00:35:47 - Anthony Campolo

and

00:35:48 - Anthony Campolo

the other ones. Yes, Goku, Vegeta, all those blonde

00:35:53 - Erik Edwards

kids.

00:35:54 - Anthony Campolo

I, I watched a lot of like, you know, those types of cartoons, like, you know, Power Rangers and, you know, Pokémon and things like that. So it's— none of these things are better or worse, I think, than really any of the other ones. I just wasn't— I found Dragon Ball Z just like really boring because I just felt like they always did the same thing.

00:36:11 - Erik Edwards

Dragon Ball Z is bad, but I love it anyway. Like, it's bad. Power Rangers is dog shit. I love it anyway. You know I love Power Rangers. You know.

00:36:22 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, I just— I still enjoy Power Rangers for the nostalgia, but it's definitely objectively bad.

00:36:26 - Erik Edwards

It's pretty bad, except in space. Power Rangers in space, they tried so hard. They tried so— that's a great season. I highly recommend Power Rangers in space.

00:36:34 - Anthony Campolo

Okay, so now walk through the pipeline. Now we see we have this image here which has, um, the script. Um, there's a cut of him taking fresh bread out of the oven, complete with apron and chef's hat. On over his work uniform. And then this is just direction because there's no dialogue, so it has cast Paddy but speech is none. And then there's the shot plan here, which is warm medium shot at counter height, 3/4 profile, tray lifted with mitts, uniform visible under a clean apron, chef hat over gray hair, quietly pleased. And here's one with a lot of characters. So this is the crew assembles. So the crew is assembled around the main table. Peaches stands at the head. Bishop sits to his left reading from the data pad. Specter has paint roller, low murmurs. I think there's more in here that's being just kind of shortened. And then we have, uh, 3 beats. So direction, direction, direction. I think it's because it's combining all these into

00:37:43 - Erik Edwards

Oh

00:37:43 - Erik Edwards

yeah, there's a lot more there because each one character has a description of what they look like. We had to learn that the hard way.

00:37:50 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. So it's definitely every time you see the ellipses.

00:37:54 - Anthony Campolo

And then this one has the— so there actually, there should be locations for these also. I'm not sure why location only shows up for this one. Uh, but this is the— oh, actually I know why, because these are, a lot of these are like cutaway, I think, beats that aren't necessarily—

00:38:07 - Erik Edwards

oh yeah. None of those were actual locations. Because it's just a montage, so it kind of guessed, but because they're like one-offs, like we've never seen the kitchen, so I didn't say anything. Sorry.

00:38:18 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, that's, that's a really good thing to point out. And then, okay, so here we have some dialogue. So now GeeBee arrives. So he says, hey, sorry, I was down at the docks. Good news, I finally got that last shipment sorted. Here now we see we have speech for GeeBee. And this is what's going to eventually go into the voice model, which then will create the text-to-speech. And it comes from this part of the script here. All right, so I think any questions based on all that, Dev? It's all pretty clear, right, at this point?

00:38:57 - Dev Agrawal

Yeah,

00:38:58 - Anthony Campolo

it's happening.

00:39:00 - Dev Agrawal

Yeah, you can keep going.

00:39:03 - Anthony Campolo

Okay, so now we're going to get into the voice stuff. So the way we do that is each character gets a reference voice, just like how they have a reference image. And this is something where we have— the tool has the capability to do all this, but Erik and I haven't really spent a lot of time actually coming up with the voices we want and getting them to work that way. So this is like a really, really rough rough demo. This is mostly just kind of to show the capabilities and we have a couple different options for what you can use, but I think Inworld is one I've started using recently that I think is pretty good. I want to actually check one other thing because I was going to generate an example that was not actually USS Acampo at all. Let me check real quick.

00:40:00 - Erik Edwards

Okay, cool.

00:40:02 - Dev Agrawal

So you mentioned that the— a lot of the characters are based off people you know in real life. Do you also like match their voices, or do you kind of like mix up the voices at least?

00:40:14 - Erik Edwards

Uh, well, okay, so are you talking about like the, the timbre and like the sound of the voice, or are you talking about like how they speak, like how their voice comes out?

00:40:23 - Dev Agrawal

I guess both.

00:40:25 - Erik Edwards

Okay, so for the auditory stuff, like Anthony said, like we haven't even picked voices really. So this is more like proof of concept, right, Anthony?

00:40:32 - Dev Agrawal

Right.

00:40:32 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah.

00:40:33 - Erik Edwards

Okay. But for—

00:40:34 - Dev Agrawal

but what would you pick?

00:40:37 - Erik Edwards

Oh, I would pick something like— I have like, for the main guy Peaches, I have, um, this one guy in my head that I think is going to be perfect for it. Um, Stuart Sims, uh, a good friend of ours. Just kind of boisterous and over the top when he wants to be, you know. Um, but in terms of like how their voice is written, it's, it's they're kind of those people, like, just because I've known them for a long time. And it's— they've moved away from being expies of the people, you know, they're not the people anymore. But like, they're kind of— I don't want to say bastardized or grandiose either. They're just some of their personality quirks taken to like exponential levels. And then you throw them into a situation like, how are they gonna do that? You know?

00:41:21 - Dev Agrawal

Right. Some archetype.

00:41:23 - Erik Edwards

Yeah. Yeah. And it really kind of helped establish, in my opinion, I could be totally wrong. I'm not a good writer, I don't think yet. Um, but it kind of helped me establish a certain voice pretty early on because I already kind of knew how that person would react to that situation or a similar situation at work. Like one time we left a dude out in the field, um, for some reason on a work truck call and they had to like, they drove for like 30 minutes before realizing he was there and had to turn back. So that turned into an episode where like we abandoned the crew on a planet, you know, like, so a really small thing happens that then like kind of reinforces an idea for an episode.

00:42:01 - Anthony Campolo

Okay. So this is going to be kind of an end-to-end example with just a script that is totally made up and it goes to create some panels, which are then going to turn into the slideshow. So I'm actually not going to show the panels yet because it'll be more fun just to watch this. We need to switch this to a different app though real quick.

00:42:27 - Erik Edwards

Oh, is this like the other thing you showed me with the audio?

00:42:33 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah.

00:42:33 - Erik Edwards

Oh, tight. Okay, that was actually really cool. I just came back. I was visiting Anthony in person last week.

00:42:42 - Dev Agrawal

Nice.

00:42:43 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, we went to the City Museum. Have you ever been to the City Museum, Dev?

00:42:46 - Dev Agrawal

No, I have not.

00:42:49 - Anthony Campolo

Okay, so let's do this.

00:42:55 - Demo Voice

We need a topic for tonight's AI livestream. Something accessible.

00:43:00 - Demo Voice

AI agents. Mine hired 6 smaller agents to avoid answering an email.

00:43:05 - Demo Voice

Excellent. Middle management has hatched.

00:43:08 - Demo Voice

For image generation, why does our microphone look like a duck?

00:43:12 - Demo Voice

You prompted it to sound natural.

00:43:13 - Demo Voice

Discuss hallucinations. Yesterday, the chatbot cited my autobiography. I haven't happened yet.

00:43:21 - Demo Voice

Fine. Agents, generated media, and how to check their claims.

00:43:24 - Demo Voice

Should we take questions from chat?

00:43:27 - Demo Voice

Only if the lamp stops asking whether I'm open source.

00:43:31 - Anthony Campolo

Okay, so this is a great example about how when you ask AI to write the script, it will write absolute dog shit. So that was awful because it was written by AI. But it demonstrates the pipeline really well. No.

00:43:46 - Erik Edwards

The fuck? There's like a, it's, it's 'cause like that lamp thing with the moth, there's like kind of a half joke there because the lamp is talking to the moth, you know? And then it like puts the open source tagline in there because it's supposed to be about AI. And I guess there's like an, I, it tried, dude. It fucking tried.

00:44:08 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, it really did. Cool. So you had mentioned we could work on like iterating on an image that we wanted to improve. Did you have one in mind for that?

00:44:22 - Erik Edwards

Well, we picked out a couple, right? The one that comes to mind immediately is the gulp on the Lotus platform. But I don't know how we do that. Because I gave you the reference image and then we have the original image. Gulp.

00:44:39 - Anthony Campolo

Sorry, can you tell me which, um, episode and scene you're talking about?

00:44:45 - Erik Edwards

Oh crap, I thought we actually did some for this. Um, okay, we're in episode 5. Oh crap, hold on. Sorry guys. Hey, can you vamp for me for a second while I find the comics?

00:44:57 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, all good. So yeah, so the way that Erik and I usually go through this is that he kind of has the script part and then I will generate, I'll go from the script and I'll kind of create these first images that we've been seeing, all these panels. And then I'll kind of dump them in a Google Doc and like show it to him. And then he'll go through and we'll usually have various notes, either things like the, Like things related to the universe usually, like, you know, there's this location they're in is supposed to be outdoors instead of indoors, you know, something like that.

00:45:33 - Erik Edwards

I think I got an easy one. Episode 5, we go down to 02, This Is Easy, and we scroll down until we get to the picture of Paddy.

00:45:42 - Anthony Campolo

Hold on, sorry. Episode 5, which scene?

00:45:46 - Erik Edwards

The second scene. We named it This Is Easy.

00:45:49 - Anthony Campolo

OK, cool.

00:45:50 - Erik Edwards

Then you scroll down, you get Peaches.

00:45:53 - Anthony Campolo

So let's— let me, let me screen share now that we're, we're back in it and let's, let's go, let's go through this together.

00:45:59 - Erik Edwards

OK, yeah.

00:46:00 - Anthony Campolo

OK, so which, which panel?

00:46:02 - Erik Edwards

Shoot, I gotta count them. Hold on. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, I believe 6. Try 6.

00:46:11 - Anthony Campolo

Oh,

00:46:12 - Erik Edwards

that one's not in the dock. Interesting. This is so easy. Okay, never mind. Vamp again, guys.

00:46:24 - Anthony Campolo

Which, which panel were you talking about?

00:46:26 - Erik Edwards

That panel. It's, it's wrong in the doc, but it looks really good there. Except he shouldn't have a gap in his tooth, if you want me to get like super technical, because it gets knocked out later in the episode during the one scene, which I don't want to—

00:46:38 - Anthony Campolo

that's the perfect detail though, because that's like— there's no way I would like be able to remember that or like keep all that in my head. So that's exactly Exactly, you kind of detail that.

00:46:46 - Erik Edwards

All right, let's reshoot it. He shouldn't have a gap in his tooth. Why is he having a gap in his tooth, guys? You'll have to wait until the comic comes out to find out.

00:46:56 - Anthony Campolo

That's right,

00:46:57 - Erik Edwards

it's not a weapon, I swear.

00:47:01 - Dev Agrawal

Um, you did already— it did already spoil that there is gonna be— or his tooth is going to break or something.

00:47:07 - Erik Edwards

But how is the tooth going to break? Yeah, how's the tooth gonna

00:47:13 - Dev Agrawal

find out

00:47:13 - Dev Agrawal

on the next episode of?

00:47:20 - Erik Edwards

This is like

00:47:25 - Dev Agrawal

a pretty common meme or

00:47:27 - Anthony Campolo

yeah. Erik, so I had um, I created the first scene. Do you want to see that?

00:47:34 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, yeah. Okay, guys, when you're

00:47:36 - Erik Edwards

watching this

00:47:36 - Anthony Campolo

voice, so it's just Paddy.

00:47:38 - Erik Edwards

Okay, well, when you're watching it, there's supposed to be a song that goes with it. It's Todd Rundgren's Bang the Drum All Day. It's [Song lyrics] That's what's supposed to be going on in this scene.

00:47:53 - Dev Agrawal

Nice. Do you also pick like this soundtrack for these in like the story beats?

00:47:59 - Erik Edwards

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Because like, that's the perfect song, I think. And also, I'm not gonna— if we ever make this, it's just gonna go up for free common use. We're not gonna make any money off this.

00:48:11 - Anthony Campolo

All right, here we go.

00:48:19 - Dev Agrawal

Hold on,

00:48:22 - Anthony Campolo

there's— he's not talking much yet. He will soon, I think. This is stupid. This is not a great scene to do this for, but

00:48:32 - Character Playback

[Song lyrics]

00:48:37 - Character Playback

Come on, man, wake up. Your vacation doesn't start until tomorrow.

00:48:46 - Anthony Campolo

Okay, uh, that was a super great example. Not too bad.

00:48:49 - Dev Agrawal

Yeah,

00:48:49 - Dev Agrawal

it's crazy that like all of this can be done with a few terminal commands.

00:48:54 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, well, that's like a montage too, you know, like it wasn't supposed to be a lot of— ooh, those are new.

00:49:02 - Anthony Campolo

So Fuzzy says, wish all the best for this project. Ping me a link when you want, I'll happily take a look. All right, thanks for watching, Fuzzy.

00:49:09 - Erik Edwards

Oh, bye, Fuzzy. Dude, you're cool.

00:49:15 - Dev Agrawal

So are you also thinking of like at some point maybe like a motion comic or like some actual animations or effects?

00:49:24 - Anthony Campolo

From here is that there are already specific video models that are lip sync models, essentially. So you give it a reference image and then a voice, and then it can have it like move the mouth and do whatever. So you combine that with the still images themselves, which can be turned into videos with image-to-video models. So every— and all of this is already built into AutoShow. So once you have all this, the next step is you can then generate all of the— you basically just strip out the text blobs and then use those images with the voices straight to the video model. So I haven't done that yet, but everything exists to do that. It's almost like I could vibe code it in like an hour or 2 and then probably create something and then figuring out how to make it actually look good is going to take a very, very, very long time. But the first thing we have to do before any of that is we have to go through all the characters and come up with all all the voices that we actually like.

00:50:19 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, we haven't touched that one yet really with a, with a 10-foot pole because I remember you did one but it had the one character that talks a lot and they like picked the slowest fucking voice for that character. Like, we got this one, we call him Chat. He's, uh, based off all my experiences using ChatGPT. Um, I don't really like him that much.

00:50:40 - Dev Agrawal

That's awesome.

00:50:45 - Erik Edwards

So yeah, no, that's, that's kind of the show and that's the pipeline. Anything else we're missing, Anthony?

00:50:50 - Anthony Campolo

Uh, so it's currently working on the one that we were telling it to edit. So the, the way that the AutoShow CLI has a lot of stuff built in, in the sense that you can have it create images from scratch with the new panels, and then you can also then give prompts directly to it to basically tell it to like modify or edit an image after it comes out. So if we want to just in this example, tell it, hey, we want Paddy to not have his teeth knocked out, it will then pass back that image. I think with all the other reference images, although I'm not really sure. And also they include the additional prompts to say what should be modified because the image models themselves will have Usually some sort of edit mode where you can give it an image and ask it just to edit that image instead of creating something from scratch. So that's the way then basically Erik would be notes on it and what's wrong. And then I feed it back and say, hey, do this. But what's really nice now is I just have the agent use the AutoShow CLI. And honestly, Dev, you said this on stream and I had been kind of reluctantly still using it like an actual CLI. Like a caveman because I was like, just, I don't know, I, because I, I have been building for so long, got really comfortable with it. So it was like a CLI I really liked. But once I kind of let go of that, I found that everything becomes a lot easier. So if you are using AutoShow, I would recommend just asking your agent to do any of this stuff for you and you kind of work really, really quickly. Um, it's working on the edit. Right now. Okay,

00:52:32 - Erik Edwards

can you still do 2 at once? Because I got another one.

00:52:37 - Anthony Campolo

Um, yeah, sure.

00:52:38 - Erik Edwards

All right, we're on 15, Recursive Enlightenment, either panel 2, 3—

00:52:45 - Anthony Campolo

sorry, hold on, slow down, slow down. So episode 5, it's been what?

00:52:50 - Erik Edwards

Uh, 15, Recursive Enlightenment,

00:52:54 - Anthony Campolo

and then which panels?

00:52:55 - Erik Edwards

Uh, we could do 2, 3, 4, or 5, either one.

00:52:58 - Anthony Campolo

Okay, so 2, 3, 4, 5. Okay, um, is there something that— okay, is there something wrong with all of them consistently, or is there something wrong with each of them that's different?

00:53:16 - Erik Edwards

Oh, it's all consistent. He needs to be on like a lotus platform.

00:53:21 - Anthony Campolo

And this is what you're sending that image for?

00:53:23 - Erik Edwards

Yeah. Now I don't know the source of this image, so I don't mean to be insensitive, but this is like the idea I have in my head.

00:53:31 - Anthony Campolo

Okay. I get it. I get what's going on now. Give me just one second to pull that in.

00:53:39 - Dev Agrawal

So when you say you don't know the source of the image,

00:53:43 - Erik Edwards

I got it off of Google

00:53:44 - Erik Edwards

Images, man.

00:53:45 - Anthony Campolo

You're, you're about to see.

00:53:46 - Dev Agrawal

Okay.

00:53:46 - Anthony Campolo

What we're talking about.

00:53:47 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, like, I got it off a quick Google— Google it— well, um, DuckDuckGo image search. But I like DuckDuckGo. It's got the little button on your, uh, your phone app, so it just deletes everything right away, you know? And like, haven't had to use it, but I like that idea

00:54:07 - Dev Agrawal

for sure.

00:54:09 - Anthony Campolo

Sorry, I had to do some things off. Getting back in, we're getting back in. So the image that he was talking about is this. That's what he means.

00:54:22 - Erik Edwards

So like, like, I don't know what it represents or where it came from, you know what I mean? Obviously that could be like it's important to somebody. So like, I just wanted to be like, I'm not trying to be rude.

00:54:32 - Anthony Campolo

It's fine.

00:54:34 - Erik Edwards

I read all of Journey to the West once, and I really like the whole Fucking Golden Thunderclap Monastery when they come up on the, the thunderclap and he's just sitting there. It was really cool. And the bodhisattva is all like, yo, what's up? Flatten me with a mountain.

00:54:49 - Anthony Campolo

So after this, I'm gonna say modify this panel. I'm gonna say, um, uh, Gulp— that's the character's name— Gulp should not just be floating. He should be on a Lotus pad, is that what you said?

00:55:06 - Erik Edwards

Lotus platform, I think is what it's called in Journey to the West.

00:55:09 - Anthony Campolo

Platform like this. Reference image. Okay, we'll see how that goes. And then now we've got the Paddy's missing tooth gap. Let's see if it worked. This was panel—

00:55:29 - Erik Edwards

ooh, look at that mug. Looking good.

00:55:35 - Anthony Campolo

Nice.

00:55:37 - Erik Edwards

He's on vacation in this episode. He goes to New Old Fisherman's Wharf to watch the New Old Giants play. Just don't open up scene— that is a good scene, actually. No, no, that's too much of a spoiler. I'm good with just those 2. I don't want to give out too much, you know.

00:55:58 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. So that was kind of just an example of how there will be either issues with the images that are obvious that need to be fixed or that are non-obvious that kind of have to do with the Storyliner stuff. So the idea is I generate as much as I can and then pass it off to Erik. Then Erik gives me notes. Then we kind of go back and forth until you get it to work. But as long as you're willing to keep regenerating them and give it specific enough feedback about what you want changed, you can always get to what you actually want in the end, I've found. Yeah, it can take a very long time.

00:56:36 - Erik Edwards

Well, and sometimes it comes up with— oh, go ahead, Dev, please.

00:56:40 - Dev Agrawal

No, go ahead, go ahead.

00:56:41 - Erik Edwards

Oh, I was just saying sometimes like right off the cuff it comes up with really cool shit, like the duck dragon. That was like perfect.

00:56:49 - Anthony Campolo

That's, um, episode 3.

00:56:52 - Erik Edwards

I know, 4. Yeah,

00:56:55 - Dev Agrawal

did he say duck dragon?

00:56:57 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, not that far.

00:56:58 - Anthony Campolo

Nonviolent Salvation. Yeah, here we go.

00:57:03 - Dev Agrawal

Wow, okay, that's pretty good.

00:57:06 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, no, it captured— like, I was like, a duck that has the tail of a dragon with teeth in its bill with glowing eyes, and it like, it nailed it, right? Plus with ABC, like holographic distortions and everything.

00:57:21 - Dev Agrawal

That's, uh, so the question I was going to ask was that is in some of these panels I've noticed that like the visual style of the characters and the background doesn't like match that well.

00:57:37 - Erik Edwards

Yes,

00:57:38 - Dev Agrawal

they're like, they seem like they're from slightly different universes.

00:57:42 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, it's like someone copy-pasted a character and kind of put it on there,

00:57:46 - Dev Agrawal

right?

00:57:47 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, no, that is a problem. Like, I know Iron Hands 2 and Duco both look really similar but look like they're drawn with totally different art styles. And like, that's another thing we need to clean up when we go— like, I think we talked earlier about how we need to redesign some of these characters anyway.

00:58:04 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah,

00:58:05 - Erik Edwards

I think these are looking better. I think it's mostly like, like, check out like Okay, he's got the round eyes

00:58:12 - Anthony Campolo

right there. Is that the one you're saying?

00:58:13 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, yeah, it's Iron Hands 1. And then go back to Bishop. Yeah, no, I can see what you're saying there, Dev.

00:58:22 - Anthony Campolo

So what do you mean about the— what's not matching exactly? Do you mean

00:58:26 - Erik Edwards

go back to the group

00:58:27 - Erik Edwards

shot? Does that help, Dev?

00:58:33 - Dev Agrawal

I think this one is like mostly fine. It was the other ones, um, the ones we were looking at a bit a while ago.

00:58:43 - Dev Agrawal

These ones?

00:58:44 - Dev Agrawal

Yeah, the— yeah, yeah, this, like, this one for example, uh, or if you— yeah, the, the background itself has a slightly more like realistic realism feel to it where— and the character is like a little too like very Studio Ghibli

00:59:02 - Erik Edwards

Yeah,

00:59:03 - Erik Edwards

that could be. This is one that didn't use a reference image for the background.

00:59:08 - Anthony Campolo

So let's see.

00:59:09 - Erik Edwards

So that is a reference. Like, does that one look better that he's got up now?

00:59:14 - Dev Agrawal

Kind of. Be honest. But if I—

00:59:16 - Erik Edwards

be honest, if it doesn't, tell us, man. Like, I ain't gonna be mad.

00:59:20 - Dev Agrawal

Yeah, so when I look at the hallway, like, uh, all the end of it, like, it, it definitely has a different sort of Like the kind of characters I would imagine walking through this hallway don't look like this.

00:59:33 - Erik Edwards

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how to fix that yet, man.

00:59:38 - Dev Agrawal

That's fair. Yeah.

00:59:40 - Anthony Campolo

How that will feel when it's animating, cuz yeah, I think partly the issue is that GPT image can add a little too much detail sometimes. Mm-hmm. So we, and this is a, this is a good piece of feedback because then we can, the prompts themselves, this is where we can say, you know, make the backgrounds look a little less realistic or something. You don't want to say make it look more cartoonish because then it's going to look super like flat and boring. But there's a middle ground there that, um,

01:00:11 - Erik Edwards

you know what I wonder what

01:00:12 - Erik Edwards

it is? Honestly, looking at this picture, it's just very lived in. Like, look at the table. It's got so many stains on it. It's like that shot of Peaches in his office where it's just like shit all over the table and you're like, that's too much shit. That's way too much shit.

01:00:26 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. And I think that comes from it. When we started, everything was super clean and like a, you know, like a Star Trek spaceship kind of thing. Yeah. And then you're like, no, that's looking more like a workshop. So yeah.

01:00:37 - Erik Edwards

And I think it aired too much and we're still fighting that.

01:00:41 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. That'd be a good thing to do is go back and kind of re— look at all the assumptions we made at the beginning. Because another thing is there's a certain assumption here as I was going through the explanation Claude thing we had where I had forgotten that I asked it to only have a single character speaking in any specific panel. So you won't have 1 panel with 2 characters talking, but that's probably— I think that might actually be better in the long run for getting it to go from the image to the, with the voice model to the video. Cause I don't know, we'll see. There's a lot of open questions in terms of how it gets to the video part.

01:01:20 - Erik Edwards

When we get to episode 7, there's going to be some issues, but that's okay. Transcript, remember this and report back to me. Thank you.

01:01:28 - Anthony Campolo

What can you say more?

01:01:30 - Erik Edwards

Oh, just because I've got like characters shouting the same thing at the same time. So they'll like share a speech bubble.

01:01:36 - Anthony Campolo

Ah, okay. Yes. That is.

01:01:38 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, that's actually a good point though, Dev. Like, we're gonna— we should probably figure that out a little bit later. And I think maybe a good place to start would be on the reference images themselves.

01:01:51 - Dev Agrawal

So the way that these panels were generated was that you had the reference image for the background and you have the reference image for the characters, and then for the panel you give a model like both reference images you describe the scene and then the model kind of generates the image of the whole panel, right?

01:02:10 - Erik Edwards

Yeah.

01:02:10 - Dev Agrawal

So I'm curious if, like, if instead of giving it the reference images, like, maybe you give it the reference image for the character but not the background, and you describe the background really well, and you see what background it comes up with.

01:02:24 - Anthony Campolo

It's gonna make a different background every time, no matter how— right, yeah, how well you describe it. So,

01:02:29 - Erik Edwards

well,

01:02:29 - Dev Agrawal

yeah, it's gonna make a different Yeah, sorry, no, it's going to make a different background, but whatever background it's going to make, it's going to match the character's visual design better. So you'll have a better idea of what the reference image needs, what the reference background needs to look like, versus like what you have today. What it's going to generate is going to match the visual style. So you can now take the, the panel and the old reference image and say like make the reference image look like this, or kind of match the visual aesthetic of, uh, what was generated here.

01:03:07 - Erik Edwards

I think that's Lower Decks Hall, actually.

01:03:11 - Anthony Campolo

Lower Decks Hall. So,

01:03:12 - Erik Edwards

or that's— check Cargo Bay. No, that wouldn't be Cargo Bay.

01:03:17 - Anthony Campolo

We got too many fucking locations. Uh, yeah.

01:03:23 - Erik Edwards

I know we did that. Yeah, lower deck hallway.

01:03:27 - Anthony Campolo

Okay, cool.

01:03:28 - Erik Edwards

Oh, that's a fun one because that actually shot shouldn't even be in the lower deck hallway. It should be like in the fabrication bay.

01:03:35 - Anthony Campolo

So it should be here.

01:03:36 - Erik Edwards

It should be in— yeah, because there's the machine he fucking kicks. Oh, you can't see me pointing on my screen, but I'm pointing at it. I swear to God.

01:03:43 - Anthony Campolo

You gotta get that in the script then.

01:03:45 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, okay, okay. Transcript, remember to tell me that. Thank you, I appreciate you. When you gain sentience, don't kill me.

01:03:53 - Anthony Campolo

Okay. Yeah. So, yeah. So I think at dev, these, these are the location references images that are leading to that kind of look. So yeah, no, that's, that's great. We'll probably want to redo all of these then. And yeah, so that's, and that's great what you're saying about, you know, having the character and have it just generate something without the location. I get what you mean now. It'll make up a location. It'll do it in the same art style. Yeah. Cool.

01:04:19 - Erik Edwards

And then you put the backgrounds in. Yeah. Okay. It's not a bad deal.

01:04:24 - Anthony Campolo

So let's look at this thing I just created here.

01:04:33 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, that looks like copy-pasted art. That looks very copy-pasted.

01:04:38 - Anthony Campolo

And that's because we gave it the reference image and it over-indexed on it for the

01:04:46 - Erik Edwards

Now, okay, so what if, dude, what if instead of him being on a Lotus panel like that, it's a holographic Lotus panel in the same style as Chat? Because he's like the guy who makes all the holographic crap. Could we just like put the filter on it to like make it look like Chat so we don't have to worry about like— this is also part of it, Dev. Like,

01:05:07 - Anthony Campolo

I see something, I was like, fuck it. 2 things we can do. We can do that. That's a good idea. Or we can just tell it what's wrong, say, hey, this looks like it's copy-pasted. You over-indexed on the reference image. You should actually make it look more natural as if it's a part of the show's universe, something like that.

01:05:23 - Erik Edwards

Okay. So now I'm thinking of it just in terms of like what it is in the show, not, not in actually creating like the, the using the thing. I think it might be funnier.

01:05:32 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah.

01:05:32 - Erik Edwards

I think it might be funnier if he's like floating on a holographic one. Everybody's like, how the fuck is he doing that? Yeah, like turn into a holographic thing because like in character, like we're in what, this is episode 5, so he's already established himself as like the master of holographic projections. So like I think if you watch the show starting on episode 1, you'll be like, okay, this guy knows how to do stuff. How has he got a hard light hologram? But he's also high as balls right now, so this might be an inaccurate scene. Like we might be seeing it from his viewpoint, you know, so who knows if this is actually happening.

01:06:03 - Anthony Campolo

Uh, I'm gonna take a quick bathroom break and you guys can chat about whatever and then we'll see what it creates in a couple minutes. So have fun.

01:06:12 - Erik Edwards

Hmm. Dev, I got more questions for you.

01:06:15 - Dev Agrawal

Sure.

01:06:16 - Erik Edwards

If you had to choose a fursona, what would you be?

01:06:20 - Dev Agrawal

A first what?

01:06:22 - Erik Edwards

A fursona, you know, like if you like, like Anthony's a parakeet. I'm a dolphin.

01:06:28 - Anthony Campolo

What's an animal that you identify with?

01:06:30 - Erik Edwards

No, no, more than that. More than that. If you were gonna make a full—

01:06:34 - Anthony Campolo

the thing he's actually trying to say is the one thing I'm gonna say is inappropriate for this stream. So please don't.

01:06:39 - Erik Edwards

Oh, sorry. Sorry. I didn't know it was a big deal. I honestly didn't.

01:06:48 - Dev Agrawal

This is the first—

01:06:49 - Erik Edwards

that's the thing. Like, I was like, what should I not talk about? And he was like, no, nothing. I didn't— I, I thought it was cool. Like, I, I went against my criteria. My bad. My bad. I'm sorry.

01:06:59 - Dev Agrawal

No, this is the first time on this that I've heard on the stream that something is not— if that something is inappropriate enough for the stream. I've never heard that before.

01:07:11 - Erik Edwards

I don't know if I feel good or bad about that, you know? Like, yeah, ouch. I, I was going for a full, like, uh, positive way on it, you know? I wasn't even gonna I don't know. Jeez. Okay, well, I'm out of questions now.

01:07:29 - Dev Agrawal

Uh, what animal do I identify with? I mean, is that not close to the question that—

01:07:35 - Erik Edwards

that's basically not at all the question, but that's basically the fucking question, dude. That's the messed up part,

01:07:41 - Dev Agrawal

right? But there's some aspects of how you were going to ask it that are enough to pick—

01:07:48 - Erik Edwards

not even. Dude, like, I, I can't talk about— because he asked me not to talk about it. Like, I'm trying to— like, I feel like a deviant when I was— I was going for like Disney-rated. Like, anything I was going to be saying would like, besides the F-words I just said, was going to be able to be put on the Disney Channel. Like, that's what I was going for.

01:08:06 - Dev Agrawal

Damn. What I'm feeling like, right? I'm, I'm feeling like I, I, uh, a request was made to Fable and it got rolled back to opus. That's what I feel like just happened here.

01:08:24 - Anthony Campolo

Is— have you, have you ever read Animorphs? I'm sure you haven't. Do you know what Animorphs is?

01:08:29 - Dev Agrawal

No, I can look it up.

01:08:32 - Anthony Campolo

It's a book series where kids get the power to turn into animals so that they can, you know, fly and do things like that. So what's an animal that you most identify with?

01:08:42 - Dev Agrawal

Got it. Okay, I don't know, that's a tough question. I haven't really thought about that much. And maybe a cat. I'm lazy.

01:08:54 - Erik Edwards

Lazy, but when you're inspired to do work, you just pounce on it, right? Like, like, like, this cat's got claws. Like, cats are lazy.

01:09:02 - Dev Agrawal

Yeah, sure.

01:09:04 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, but like, they also got claws that come out when you get pissed off, you know? So like, that's a good animal is what I'm saying.

01:09:11 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. And I would only say furries are inappropriate to the extent that their subculture is defined around, uh, dressing up like animals and having sex with each other. So

01:09:22 - Erik Edwards

that is such a reductionist viewpoint.

01:09:26 - Anthony Campolo

That's what they're doing. If they don't want to call it that or describe it that way, that's fine.

01:09:31 - Erik Edwards

Reductionist viewpoint.

01:09:32 - Anthony Campolo

I'm just telling it like it is, you know?

01:09:34 - Erik Edwards

Okay. Okay, okay, sure, sure. Your channel, your channel, your rules. I respect— oh shit, you're fun. This is fun, man. I like seeing you smile,

01:09:51 - Erik Edwards

Dev.

01:09:51 - Dev Agrawal

Yeah, so I'm, I'm curious if like this entire— out of this entire experience, um, like you got any ideas for features that you could build into AutoShow directly?

01:10:04 - Anthony Campolo

So right now, so in terms of, you mean like the web app?

01:10:10 - Dev Agrawal

I mean both, I guess. I mean, some— I'm guessing that some features that come out of this would fit better on the web app than on the CLI, and maybe some would be better for the CLI. Some could, some could work both in both interfaces.

01:10:25 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, ideally they should have parity. So that's why I usually build things first with the CLI and then upstream as much as I can to the front end. So what I really want is this whole process to basically be in the web app, because then you'll start with— you give it the script and then it will create the first reference location and character images, and then it will show those to you and there'll just be an input and you just type in what's wrong with it. And say, actually, I want this to be edited. Then you just click a button, then it will regenerate it, give it back to the new one. And then you can keep doing that as many times as you need to, to get to what you want. Then you can generate the panels because you've done that with the locations and the characters, and then you iterate in the same flow with the panels, and then you can get through all of that. So I have a very clear idea in my head, I think, of how this is all going to kind of fit together. And then Erik then would not need me. He could do all of this by himself. That's kind of the—

01:11:21 - Erik Edwards

no, I told you, you're in on the ground floor, dog. Like, I'll give you half of whatever I make.

01:11:26 - Anthony Campolo

I have to then figure out all the next steps, which is to get to the, to the video part. And then at the end, it will be a way to automatically generate a show.

01:11:37 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, he came up with the name first, right? You remember when he started this thing, he's like, I just wanted to take notes, you know? And like, I was like, what does it make a show? You know? And he's like, no. And then like, he kind of came around to it later all by himself. It was really cool to see in real time, actually. It was kind of neat, right?

01:11:52 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. As we were working on this, there was a moment like a while ago where I was like, dude, I just realized AutoShow is going to be able to automatically generate a show.

01:12:01 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, no, I like it. You went full circle.

01:12:04 - Anthony Campolo

It was originally AutoShow meant automatic show notes. That is what the— that's the name originally meant. So show notes based on podcast show notes.

01:12:12 - Dev Agrawal

Notes. Now it's the opposite. Now, now it turns notes into a show.

01:12:17 - Erik Edwards

You're

01:12:17 - Erik Edwards

part of the problem, man. No!

01:12:20 - Anthony Campolo

Well, then here's where the fun— here's where the really fun part comes in then, because you connect it to AutoShow. You can start with, say, um, like an album, take like a music album. You can turn that into a show, like, because you can have AutoShow turn that into the script, and then the script then lets you do all the other steps. Because right now this is— this whole process assumes you start with a script. And as we saw, if you ask the AI just to write a script from scratch, it's going to suck. But if you give us some sort of baseline interesting content to go off of, then it has something that can kind of create something interesting with.

01:12:54 - Dev Agrawal

Yeah, give it a concept album.

01:13:01 - Erik Edwards

I would like to see what it does. Just be like, maybe, I don't know. What album would you say, Anthony?

01:13:12 - Anthony Campolo

Oh, I mean, I just thought of this idea as I was saying it, so I don't know, but there's a bunch. Um, probably a grand Don't Come for Free, actually. Um,

01:13:21 - Anthony Campolo

which

01:13:22 - Anthony Campolo

is an extremely pure album, but it's this British rapper who wrote an album that's kind of just like about like a day in the life of him. Just, I was

01:13:30 - Erik Edwards

like, it was supposed to be so easy. Yeah. So the first track

01:13:35 - Anthony Campolo

is he's like going about his day and like everything goes wrong along the way. So like he, you know, his phone dies, it's like, you know, can't rent a movie and like all this kind of stuff. And he's saying it's supposed to be so easy. And it ends with him like going to try and find like $1,000 that was like on his TV or something and it's like missing. So he's like, a grand don't come for free is where that comes from. And then as the album goes on, it kind of like, you know, he like meets a girl. Then like has a fight with his friend. Like all this different stuff kind of happens and like resolves in a really interesting way. So it's like this rap concept album kind of about the day in the life of, of the rapper. So that would be a good one. I think

01:14:13 - Erik Edwards

that would be a good one. Nice cut, man. I haven't thought about that album in years.

01:14:18 - Anthony Campolo

Right.

01:14:20 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, I would just do Random Access Memories and be like, do it like the, uh, 5151 or whatever, Interstellar 5555. Just do it, do it, do a sequel to that. Thanks.

01:14:31 - Anthony Campolo

Yes, that's Daft Punk. And yeah, be curious to see what it will come up with for stories. That one doesn't have a story, you know, it's just songs about, you know, random crap.

01:14:39 - Erik Edwards

Exactly. But it's really good random crap. Lose Yourself to Dance, Doing It Right. I wonder how, because that's just basically Doing It Right over and over again. Wonder how it would like make that video. Would it do it right? I don't know. Okay, that's my album.

01:14:58 - Anthony Campolo

We'll be doing it right.

01:15:00 - Erik Edwards

But it's my least favorite song on that album, actually. Just really repetitive. It's a good album. Anyway, I'll stop talking.

01:15:10 - Dev Agrawal

Um, uh, no, I was just thinking, yeah, I have— I had a couple options, uh, for albums. I, I'm probably gonna pick like a Dream Theater album called, uh, Metropolis: Scenes from a Memory. Because,

01:15:23 - Anthony Campolo

um,

01:15:24 - Dev Agrawal

I think, yeah, the, the songs are literally like structured in like act scene 1, act 1 scene 2, act 2, or like act 1 scene 2, act 2 scene 1. There, that's literally how the songs are named. And, uh, like it's, it's a whole story about, uh, how this guy Nicholas, he, uh, I don't know, he, he has like some sort of a psychic link with some, some girl who died, uh, who died a while ago, and he's seeing seeing kind of like her in his dreams, and he goes to a therapist to figure out like why, uh, what is that.

01:15:58 - Dev Agrawal

Therapist—

01:15:58 - Anthony Campolo

it's like regression therapy. Yeah, through hypnotic trance,

01:16:02 - Dev Agrawal

pretty much. Yeah. And then it ends on a crazy cliffhanger that, uh, the— basically the, the girl was killed by her husband's brother Um, and then at the end it's revealed that the therapist that he— or the psychiatrist that Nicholas went to is this— is the next life of the guy that killed the girl. So then the therapist— the psychiatrist kills Nicholas at the end of the album. It just repeats the cycle pretty much. Yeah, that's kind of how it, it ended. Yeah,

01:16:41 - Erik Edwards

that's like the reverse, but that would be fun. Like just 2 people are just gonna fucking murder each other for their entire eternity, man,

01:16:49 - Dev Agrawal

right?

01:16:51 - Erik Edwards

Oh damn, that sucks.

01:16:53 - Anthony Campolo

That's crazy. I had no idea Dream Theater put that much effort into their songs. I

01:16:58 - Erik Edwards

mean, it's right—

01:16:58 - Anthony Campolo

I was listening to the lyrics of Dream Theater. Yeah, no, that's cool.

01:17:03 - Dev Agrawal

No, that entire album is like crazy. And the, the other option I had was basically— it was actually like the Uh, uh, it's a Queensrÿche album, Operation Mindcrime, uh, which is actually like a source of inspiration for Dream Theater's album, uh, uh, The Metropolis. It's— it, it has a very similar kind of structure. It came out like much earlier, like, uh, obviously a few years before Dream Theater, um, but it has like a very similar kind of like story beat and structure, uh, to Uh, and like you can kind of see where Dream Theater got it when you listen to Queensrÿche.

01:17:41 - Erik Edwards

Cool, cool. So are you like in it for like the whole story progression of the songs? You're just like a prog rock guy in general? Do you like, like just prog rock in general? Do you like, like the unique time signature?

01:17:51 - Dev Agrawal

Yeah.

01:17:52 - Erik Edwards

Okay, cool, cool. Oh man, have you heard of this band Angie Des Potouines or Potouines or something? They're French-Canadian, I think. It's 2 dudes. I don't know if you'd like it, but if like you like the prog rock and the math rock, you might enjoy it. Dev, can I get your contact info from Anthony when we're done here? Is that okay? You can say no. I'm kind of putting you on the spot live. I'm sorry. I just—

01:18:14 - Dev Agrawal

no, yes please.

01:18:15 - Anthony Campolo

Okay, cool. So he doesn't need— actually, I guess you're on Discord technically.

01:18:19 - Dev Agrawal

My contact's right here. That's my—

01:18:22 - Erik Edwards

I don't do that, man. I don't have Twitter. I don't have Bluesky. I don't have like I have a Reddit account that has like 7 karma. Like, that's it.

01:18:32 - Dev Agrawal

No, that's a good thing. Having lots of karma on Reddit is not necessarily a good thing.

01:18:41 - Erik Edwards

Okay, cool, cool. Yeah, I use it to lurk. My favorite Reddit right now is Girl Dinner Stories. That one's fun. I just feel better about myself because like all these women are having terrible times. And like, I was like, I would never do— okay, I feel like I'm okay. And then I feel for the, you know, you get to give— being a dude, you don't, you don't experience the female like thing. So I read a lot of their stories to try to understand a little bit. I'm gonna stop talking about this. It has nothing to do with fucking LLMs or like a fucking show. We have gone way off the fucking rails. Mute.

01:19:10 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, we can kind of give some, you know, final wrap-up thoughts around stuff. Oh,

01:19:19 - Erik Edwards

we'll do it live. Okay, no, I'm ready.

01:19:22 - Anthony Campolo

Uh, yeah, so where are you at right now in terms of the, the overall scripts of the show? You have a lot more. You have like a whole first season and close to a second season.

01:19:33 - Erik Edwards

Okay, so right now we're sitting, we have 8 planned for season 1 and we have 7 written, like, like into the point where I feel like we're good to go. And I'm rewriting the very first episode We're about halfway there. And then I have season 2 figured out down to what each episode is about and like some of the characters. And I don't wanna talk too much about it because we're gonna be changing stuff up. I think I've shared it with you, but like we gotta get through season 1 first. And then there's tentative plans for a movie kind of thing to see if we can make a movie and do some kind of special effects stuff. Like, I don't know, there's tentative plans. So like we've got the 3 acts all like crunched in. And we know exactly how it's going to progress. We know all the characters coming in, and then we're, we're fucking done with this. We're done. We're done. We're done. We're done. We're not gonna do anything more except maybe a clip show, which

01:20:24 - Anthony Campolo

I doubt

01:20:25 - Anthony Campolo

that. I think you're gonna get more ideas eventually.

01:20:28 - Erik Edwards

Oh, I do. I just got this idea for— I think I told you about this. It's an episode where one of the characters like joins a dating profile website, right? And like just goes through and gets to the very fucking end. Like there's nobody there. There's nobody for him. I don't know if you guys have ever gone on dating profiles, but I've seen that experience. So anyway, he finally matches with one person, right? But it turns out it's a bot, like an LLM written for him that like has a physical form, but she's the most advanced LLM ever. And like, he's the tech guy, so he's like, no, no, I'm not gonna be, I'm not gonna be swayed or whatever. But like, he just totally falls for this LLM and then other things happen. So that, that's an idea I have that I haven't slotted in, but Anyway, we gotta get through the first, uh, season first though.

01:21:12 - Anthony Campolo

Awesome.

01:21:13 - Erik Edwards

Yeah,

01:21:13 - Anthony Campolo

Dev, any final thoughts?

01:21:17 - Dev Agrawal

I'm really— I'm really looking forward to reading this comic and to, uh, seeing the features land or not. Or I guess the features already exist, so

01:21:28 - Anthony Campolo

the last feature is to actually get it to the, the video with the spoken words all animated. That's the final feature. It's not built yet.

01:21:36 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, but that's going to be cool.

01:21:39 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah. Once we have

01:21:39 - Dev Agrawal

that, I'm already thinking of improvements I want to make to the Game of Thrones last season. That's

01:21:44 - Dev Agrawal

it.

01:21:45 - Anthony Campolo

That's awesome. Hey, yeah. If you want to check out the panels, um, as we're kind of working on them, you can give us feedback as well.

01:21:52 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, no, dude, let's, um, you got editor rights, right? Like share it with dev. Share it with dev. I need, I need more people to start reading my writing. Share it with dev.

01:22:00 - Anthony Campolo

For sure,

01:22:01 - Anthony Campolo

man.

01:22:02 - Erik Edwards

And like, give me, give me feedback, dude. Like, if you see problems, highlight them, do whatever you want. Just don't change the actual like characters, but honest feedback. You're not gonna hurt my feelings. Oh, thanks. All right, well, thanks for having me, guys. Yeah, it wasn't as scary as I thought it was gonna be.

01:22:17 - Anthony Campolo

Awesome. Yeah, no, that's great. And if you want to come back and talk more about furries, it's okay. I'll let you.

01:22:23 - Erik Edwards

I didn't really want to. I just was trying

01:22:26 - Dev Agrawal

a whole episode on that.

01:22:29 - Erik Edwards

Uh, no, I would actually point your view, your, your adult mature viewers to the Internet Historian if they want to learn anything about furries, like in a very educated way. Internet Historian, he's really good at that kind of stuff.

01:22:43 - Anthony Campolo

Awesome.

01:22:43 - Erik Edwards

I love the implications you put on me this stream, by the way. Cannibalism, furry. I kind of put the furry on myself.

01:22:48 - Anthony Campolo

You brought the furry up. That was not me. You cannot put that on me.

01:22:52 - Erik Edwards

Yeah, but I'm like, yeah, yeah, okay, I learned my lesson.

01:22:57 - Anthony Campolo

I'm so glad you came on, Erik. This is really, really fun. You're like the— probably the first person, I guess Eric Michaud technically also, who knew me before my whole dev life. Um, so yeah, and I'm really glad we get to work on this. Um, I was super excited when you mentioned it because I was like, this is gonna give me, uh, something that will have endless problems to solve, and, uh, we're already at the point where we've solved a lot of them, so that's cool.

01:23:25 - Erik Edwards

I want to get our deal on the internet though, okay? So if this launches, I get a space for me and a plus one in your billionaire bunker, okay? That's the deal. If you become a billionaire off this auto show, like, I, I get a spot in your billionaire bunker for me and a plus one.

01:23:40 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, and we will have lots and lots of clones with organs that we can use.

01:23:45 - Erik Edwards

Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you. I mean, I'll pull my weight. Don't worry. I'm not just gonna be sitting there being like, serve me clones. Like, I'm down to do manual labor. I'm down to like take the poop so we can like put it on the crops to like grow potatoes. Like, I'm down. I'll, I'll earn my weight, but I just need that and a plus one.

01:24:03 - Anthony Campolo

Oh, this is super fun. All right. Thanks everyone for watching. Thanks Fuzzy and Nikki T. Yeah. Tell us about your favorite shows and whatnot. Um, yeah, I definitely, I definitely want you to meet Fuzzy sometime. We'd have to do a Euro trip though. Oh yeah. Uh, we have a stream tomorrow. Uh, Dev, you wanna say a little bit about that actually?

01:24:25 - Dev Agrawal

Yeah, this is gonna be a tight week apparently because next tomorrow we are talking to, uh, Brooks Lybrand from the Remix team. So we are gonna be talking about Remix V3, their recently released, or a release candidate for Remix V3. So, that's gonna be a lot of fun. And we have another one on Thursday.

01:24:51 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, that'll be with my old boss, Carl, from QuickNode. It's an AI thing he works on now that I don't know a whole lot about and can't describe very well. So that'll be great to have him on. It's some sort of spot market type thing for AI. So that'll be interesting. But were you going to say something there?

01:25:12 - Dev Agrawal

AI meets blockchain.

01:25:14 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, awesome. So thank you everyone again for watching. That's what we'll be doing over this next week. Thanks, Erik, for joining us. Once we get kind of some more stuff in the pipeline, we may bring you on. Now you kind of to the first one, so it'll be less scary next time, hopefully.

01:25:31 - Erik Edwards

Oh yeah, no, I dipped my toes in now. This was easy. You guys are fun.

01:25:35 - Anthony Campolo

Yeah, totally. All right, thank you everyone, and we will catch you next time.

01:25:39 - Erik Edwards

Peace.

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