That's wild. Hard to say for sure—could be that your scenario's structure pattern-matched something in Qwen's training data, or it picked up on implicit episodic cues in your writing. The base model has seen a lot of serialized content. What was the original scenario about?
Interesting use case. I don't have a public API yet, but it's something I'd consider if there's demand. What kind of integration are you imagining—feeding prompts in and getting branches back, or something else?
Enthusiastic amateur here. I have no film school or real writing experience.
I’d use it to explore branching first. My system has a rich knowledge tree and could write some very detailed prompts. We would discuss the results and integrate them into our tree.
I want to have that visual graph representation for myself as well, but it seems like my text repo really needs some structural formality.
I also think your system would be a good consultant for mine. We have questions about story writing, you have an endpoint for that.
My current story is being written for the page, no film contemplated yet, so I haven’t thought about access your screenplay tools yet.
That's a cool setup. An API that returns the branching structure as JSON would fit your use case well—you'd feed in a prompt, get back the graph, and integrate it into your knowledge tree however you want.
I'll keep this in mind as I plan the API. If you want to stay in touch, I just created an X account—it's on my HN profile.
The Oblique Strategies comparison is exactly the vibe I was going for—generative constraints that open up possibilities rather than closing them down. Node editing is the top priority right now. You're right that the loop isn't complete without it.
Not yet, but both are on the roadmap. Manual node editing is the next priority—letting you tweak branches or add your own directions.
The script evaluation idea is interesting—you're not the first to suggest it. The extraction pipeline already identifies structural elements like scene mirroring and character arc inversions, so exposing that as an analysis tool isn't a huge leap. Definitely something I want to explore.
There's a demo on the landing page that walks through it. Basically you input any idea—no matter how vague—and the system generates branching directions you could take it. You explore the branches, and when you're satisfied you can export and the system generates a technical screenplay based on your choices.
There's no "right" first prompt—I've thrown some of my dumbest ideas at it just to see where the system takes me. That's kind of the point.
Regarding adding your own branches—yes, that's on my roadmap. Letting users create their own options and shape the graph more directly. Still a work in progress!
Thanks! Here's the full list:
2001: A Space Odyssey, 8½, Aguirre the Wrath of God, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, All That Heaven Allows, Apocalypse Now, Ashes and Diamonds, A Woman Under the Influence, Barry Lyndon, Bicycle Thieves, Breathless, Casablanca, Céline and Julie Go Boating, Chinatown, Chinese Roulette, Citizen Kane, City Lights, City of Pirates, Contempt, Daisies, Damnation, Dishonored, Earth, Electra My Love, El Topo, Eraserhead, Eyes Wide Shut, Film Socialisme, Fitzcarraldo, Fuego en Castilla, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Holy Motors, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, In a Year with 13 Moons, India Song, Inland Empire, Irma Vep, Koyaanisqatsi, La Dolce Vita, La Jetée, Late Spring, L'Eau de la Seine, Le Voyage dans la Lune, Lolita, Los Olvidados, Lost Highway, Lucifer Rising, Man with a Movie Camera, Metropolis, Mirror, Mulholland Drive, Night Music, Ordet, Orpheus, Persona, Pickpocket, Playtime, Psycho, Rebecca, Rosemary's Baby, Rumble Fish, Scarface, Seven Samurai, Sherlock Jr., Singin' in the Rain, Stalker, Sunset Boulevard, Taste of Cherry, Taxi Driver, Testament of Orpheus, The 400 Blows, The Blood of a Poet, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Color of Pomegranates, The Green Ray, The Holy Mountain, The Isle, The Lady from Shanghai, The Night of the Hunter, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Seventh Seal, The Spirit of the Beehive, The Tales of Hoffmann, The Tree of Life, The Turin Horse, Time of the Gypsies, Tokyo Story, Touch of Evil, Trans-Europ-Express, Ugetsu, Un Chien Andalou, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Vampyr, Videodrome, Wavelength, Werckmeister Harmonies, Wild Strawberries, Moonlight Sonata, Stellar, The Haunted House
Biased toward European art cinema, experimental work, and directors who broke conventional narrative rules.
Is that issue not immediately apparent to you? Your splash page says literally nothing. Why can't you put even a tiny example of what this is all about? You can't expect people to hand over personal information to hear an elevator pitch.
Hi HN, I'm a computer systems engineering student in Mexico who switched from film school. I built CineGraphs because my filmmaker friends and I kept hitting the same wall—we'd have a vague idea for a film but no structured way to explore where it could go. Every AI writing tool we tried output generic, formulaic slop. I didn't want to build another ChatGPT wrapper, so I went a different route.
The idea is simple: you input a rough concept, and the tool generates branching narrative paths visualized as a graph. You can then sculpt those branches into a structured screenplay format and export to Fountain for use in professional screenwriting software.
For the training data, I spent a month curating 100 films I consider high-quality cinema—Godard, Kurosawa, Brakhage, and others. I built a 1000+ line extraction pipeline using Qwen3-VL to pull narrative structure, characters, and themes from each film with subtitles enabled. From those extractions I generated a 10K example dataset and fine-tuned Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct with a LoRA optimized for probabilistic story branching. The graph visualization is built with React Flow.
We've been using it ourselves to break through second-act problems and explore narrative directions we wouldn't have considered otherwise. The branching format forces you to think in possibilities rather than committing too early.
You can try it at https://cinegraphs.ai/ — the free tier gives you 3 projects. Would love feedback on the generation quality and whether the graph interface feels intuitive for your workflow.
Can I ask, did you pull all this from subtitles and scripts?
Quite frankly, the corpus of film criticism might be a better source. Analysis of context, interpretation, intent, result, success, failure, contention might be more useful to shape a story than the literal story itself. It's asking too much of current gen LLMs to be able to synthesize motif at a higher abstraction. In my experience they get stuck on specific examples and crudely stitching pastiche together, instead of working in the blank empty space between thoughts and ideas.
I also am unsure that "describe your opening scene" is the best place to start. I may have a story that has a tangible beginning, middle, end, and want to fix certain elements along the way. "This must happen to start act 3" so the story coherently steers correctly towards goals.
would be nice to see sample conversation shared publicly to understand what it exactly generates. It could be even good for your SEO if you share couple of them
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