I am Printing Verticals, Baby!

So! I said end of August was the cutoff for getting access to my show making app before launch via Substack (grandfathered access) - I’m giving y’all ONE MORE CHANCE tonight, because I’m pushing out app account invites to our paid substack folx tomorrow.

I have spent the last day and a half tightening things up to print verticals. And by printing verticals I actually mean that. I just watched Astra roll a perfect 1 min vertical episode in singular 30 second takes. I can tell him “make episode 5,” and he will.

There is still some human decision layering needed, unless you truly want to handoff, which is possible - you can do that. But, you’re still going to get better results if you occasionally steer, so let’s call this on a sliding scale from 70-90% autonomous, depending on what you’re after.

But what we managed in the last 5 days:

Astra can now edit. And he can edit WELL. I let him use Davinci Resolve, and he scripted his way into cutting a vertical here, and it was a GOOD cut. Where he failed, I sent him back, and it got even better.

ASTRA WAS HERE:

This took less than a minute for him to cut. I am STILL trying to wrap my head around that. I cut that same 3 minute short film earlier that day and it took me 40 minutes.

Here’s some of the work he did for me today—granted, I’m rolling at 480p to test (because we had to throw some of our earlier tries away before we honed in the prompting, and these are not cheap). He rolled my episode 2 overnight:

And for episode 3, he decided we needed a flashback scene, so he went and rolled that in the sandbox and stitched it together. Granted, I need to take out the weird levitating cup (this system is GOOD but it’s still not perfect!), or rather, tell him to go take it out (and he will!!). But the FEELS. Ahhhh.

AND here’s the one he just rolled in one take per 30 second video (not stitched together yet because I got too excited and sent him after episode 5:

These are all 100% rolled by Astra via MCP connection with my Fiction.show app (the latest unreleased version). Scripts are from my own vertical drama scripts adapted from one of my novellas.

The system works between the app, the agent, and the skills to drive the agent.

Is there perfect continuity? It’s around 80-90%, not 100% yet, and mostly right now it’s in background blocking. That’s something I’ll keep nailing down as we go—or you can nail down, too, because every prompt is exposed and editable, and the skills will be yours to use and adapt as needed. Astra can take slices of earlier takes and use them as context for later ones if you ask, too. That’s a solvable problem, we have come so far, and we are there for verticals now!!

I’m going to upscale these to 1080p, throw some music behind them (which actually, will see if Astra can do that, too, and that’s probably a yes), and roll with it.

Because HOLY SHIT.

“Hey Astra, go make episode 5”

20 minutes later: “Episode 5 is ready for you to review!”

Astra as a model was the last piece we needed—Fable and Opus and Sol can run this, too, but only Astra has been able to edit, or have the taste to fully pull off solid full episodes so far.

SO. You want the sauce? You have tonight yet (till midnight PST) for the cutoff. Tomorrow, invites go out to our current Substack paid subscribers (and if you haven’t sent me your email yet, please do!!). And in ~a week, this goes live for public beta on https://fiction.show. I plan to keep it free for all current Substack paid subscribers who’ve subscribed before tonight, because you all have been my testing layer, and it wouldn’t be nearly the app it is without you!! And it’ll continue to be grandfathered free as long as you’re a paid subscriber.*

*this is BYOK - app will be free, but you’ll still need to pay API generation costs!

But my dream, asking the AI to make an episode for me, is actually here. My god.

-Novae