An engine, built to turn stories into animation prompts.
Client
Personal project
Year
2026
Type
Desktop app
Role
Product Designer & Build
01 — Starting condition
Built to give story ideas a proper system.
Story and animation ideas move fast: a concept becomes reference images, then specific decisions about pacing, staging and camera. That process deserved a system of its own, one place to hold the story, the assets and the decisions together, with a clear path from that structure straight through to animation-ready output. So that's what got built, owned end to end rather than assembled from someone else's platform.
TBC
02 — Approach
Decide the rules before touching the interface.
Two decisions did most of the work. First: no server, no cloud database. Every project lives in its own folder, so it can be backed up, moved, or opened on another machine without anything else needed. Second: nothing changes without being written down first. Before a new feature touches how a project is saved, the change is documented and tested, so nothing breaks work already in progress. Small discipline, and it's exactly what makes the tool one you can trust.
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03 — What was delivered
How the engine works.
Turns a written scene into a ready-to-use prompt for both a storyboard and the animation itself, checking automatically that everything lines up before it's sent off, saving real money along the way. A structure that's been rebuilt 13 times without ever losing a saved project. A proper Mac app, installed and used daily. Close to 250 automated tests, because a personal project earning trust still has to behave like one.
TBC
Schema
13 revisions since v1, with every entry point, opening a project, importing one, or running it from the command line, guarded against loading a version the app doesn't support.
Storage
One self-contained folder per project, holding the story, assets and moodboard together, reconciled automatically every time it saves.
Character references
A fixed contract per character (five main views, six palette swatches, five detail crops), so the model always knows exactly what to trust and why.
Distribution
Wrapped and installed as a real macOS app, no server involved.
Testing
246 tests across 32 files, with checks that fail the build if the output drifts by even a byte.
TBC
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04 — Outcome
Parked the interface. Kept the engine.
The most interesting result was realising where the real value actually lived: not in the screen, but in what powered it. Most of the real thinking happens in conversation. So the interface was set aside as a simple viewer, and the logic behind it, the part that actually does the thinking, now runs on its own and plugs in wherever it's needed. Still actively developed.
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