About

Shadow Brain Stories are ninety-second films. Each one tells an old story straight, in the order it was first told, and then says in a single line what it was about. The line is the whole point. The story is how you get to feel it before you hear it.

Why shadow puppets

The films are made in the manner of Lotte Reiniger's cut-paper silhouette films: black paper, an amber screen, a lamp behind it. Silhouettes hide faces and show gestures, which is the right way to tell a story about the parts of a person that are not on the surface. A shadow on a wall can be a character. In season one it is.

Season one: the shadow

Carl Jung called the shadow the part of yourself you have not met: everything you have refused, projected or never looked at, which meets you anyway, usually as somebody else. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving story, is that idea told four thousand years before Jung. A king with no equal is given one, made from clay, in his own image. What follows is the story of what the meeting costs.

How they are made

The scripts are written by a person. The silhouette scenes are generated with AI video tools from hand-built reference sheets, one ten-second scene at a time; the narration is a synthetic voice; the music is generated. The edit, the timing to the voice, the choice of what to keep and what to throw away, is done by hand with the same tools an editor would use. Every published episode is labelled as made with AI on the platform it appears on.

Who

Made by Shadow Brain, which also keeps a free edition of Homer's Odyssey online. Write to ask.shadow.brain@gmail.com.