StickyBrief

The idea

“Big questions, explained in sticks.” Short, funny explainers about history, science and stories, drawn as ink stick figures on lined notebook paper with coloured sticky notes. Long videos run 5 to 13 minutes; Shorts are cross-posted to TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.

What we built

There’s no video editor in the loop. A script file goes in and a finished, upload-ready video comes out.

• The script is voiced with local text-to-speech, and faster-whisper produces word-level timings for the captions
• Each scene is an SVG page where every frame is a pure function of time, rendered frame-exact in a headless browser
• Frames are encoded with x264 in parallel chunks
• Sound effects are synthesized, so there’s nothing to license; the music bed ducks under the voice
• The pipeline also writes the title, description, chapters, sources, tags and the thumbnails

Result

A 45-second Short renders in about two minutes and a 9-minute video in about ten, which makes a daily Shorts schedule realistic for a one-person channel.