Why nine is called nine

Who does what in the local studio workflow

These roles were written for the local studio. They explain the separation between making a film, measuring it and deciding whether it is ready. Their responsibilities are described below.

• You, and the brief You say what the film is for, who is watching, and what they should be able to do afterwards. Your words become one note per scene, and those notes are the checklist everything later is measured against. Nothing is scored against a summary of your brief. It is scored against your brief.
• The author Writes the film's words from the brief, and on a later round carries out the judge's orders one by one. Does not score the film, and never decides that its own work is good enough.
• The panel Reads the film through the studio's own lenses: direction, camera, animation, story, sound, the audience, and craft. A lens the studio does not have is refused rather than accepted, so the panel cannot grow a role nobody wrote.
• The gates Seventeen instruments measure the finished film: the picture, the layers, the empty stretches, the left edge of every line. They measure rather than opinion. A gate that finds nothing and a gate that looked at nothing must never read the same way, so silence is its own answer.
• The judge Scores every scene from 1 to 10 against your own words, with one reason for each, and reports each verdict as it lands. This is the role the studio calls the boss. Cannot edit the film, cannot touch a file, cannot write the film's words. It does not even know how to edit.
• The customer's eye Reads the finished film last, as the customer, scores it out of ten, names the one to three objections that matter, and says send, send with reservations, or do not send. Cannot edit either, and is told not to agree with the judge. It is the second column, not a second opinion of the first.

The separation is the whole design. Whoever scores a film cannot repair it, and whoever repairs it does not score it. A judge that could change the film would be marking its own work, and a score from a thing marking its own work is worth nothing.

Why the target is nine

A film can always be improved. Nine gives that ambition a number: a high target that leaves room to keep looking at the work.

In the local studio, reviews can return a film with specific changes. On the current online service, the selected quality target and available review rounds shape the process. An automated score is one check to consider when you review the result.

Strictness is the point of it. Nine is not a machine that produces a film at random and announces that it is pleased. It hands work back. On one real film a single scene below the bar sent the whole film round again, twice, after six scenes had already done it once.

Review can stop when its target is met or its allowed rounds are used. Check the result itself, including facts, words, picture and sound, before deciding that it is ready to publish.

Earlier work in the local studio

These are the founder's previously reported examples from the local studio. They describe individual projects. Current online film lengths, allowances and features are on the prices page.

• Two revision rounds. Hours and hours of talking head video with animation laid over it, delivered on the second round.
• 50+ page scripts, taken from a single upload to a finished film. Complex films of five to fifteen minutes, and runtimes up to seven hours.
• 24 hours. Everything above was delivered inside a day, exactly the way the client wanted it to look.
• Studio automated production workflows. These examples came from the local studio tools that preceded the public service.

The first of these came from a tender. A large company wanted to replace its whole production with AI made animation films. There was no tool that could do it, so one was built.

Those claims are the owner's. The machinery underneath them is real and it is his, and the the two scores show what the same films were given by two different readers rather than one.

What nine is not

• Not a replacement for illustrators. It is a collaboration tool. It draws inside the material a studio or a brand already owns, and it works in the client's own language rather than in the vocabulary of a film tool. The people who design films use it to design their own, and they stay the ones who decide what it looks like.
• Not a machine that decides it is happy with itself. The judge is built so that it cannot touch what it grades, and a second reader is told, in writing, not to agree with it. On one round the judge passed fourteen films at 9.1 to 9.3 and the second reader scored the same fourteen between 4 and 8 and said three must not go out.
• Not a black box you have to take on faith. The work happens where you can watch it: the film's own record is written while it is being built and it names which role acted and when, so the running commentary is the real one rather than a script written afterwards.
• A score needs your judgement. The online checks are automated and can miss problems. The film should be reviewed by the person who will use it before it is shared.

How it started

• Early this year, a tender arrived. A large company wanted to replace its whole production with AI made animation films. It was a serious, specific job with a real deadline, and it was not looking for a demo.
• There was no tool that could do it. Not one that could hold a script of fifty pages, keep a client's own look, and be honest about whether the result was good enough. So the tool was built, in a working studio, against real films rather than a specification.
• Nine now has an online service and a local studio. They share a history and have different workflows. This page explains the studio standard behind the name; the help and prices pages describe what the current online service offers.

Who made it