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Divine Tribe Software · Open Source

Story Forge

A local-only generative cinema pipeline. Animated films on one laptop. No cloud.

Python + ffmpeg5 local AI modelsNo cloudOpen source
⭐ View on GitHub 💖 Sponsor the work
4:08
First Saga Runtime
43
Scenes
12 hr
Compute
0
Cloud Calls
What's new — May 24, 2026

2026-05-24 ship state

Three firsts landed this week. Each one shrinks the gap between "open the laptop" and "watch the finished film."

🎥
Public first Apple Silicon MPS

LTX 13B distilled 0.9.8 running on Apple Silicon

118 seconds per 5-second clip on M5 Max via MPS — first known public port of the distilled LTX 13B to Apple's GPU stack. No CUDA, no rented A100, no waitlist.

⚡
2-step distill trained on-device

Wan 2-step distillation — trained on the laptop itself

We train our own step-distillation LoRA for Wan directly on Apple Silicon, collapsing 4 denoising steps into 2. As far as we can find, this is the first distillation training of a video model done on a Mac instead of a data center — the model gets faster on the same machine that runs it.

📜
DSL Deterministic Scriptable

Story Forge DSL — .sf → .mp4 in one command

A scene-graph script language designed for film, not JSON. Hand it a .sf file, get a finished .mp4 back. Deterministic, repeatable, diffable, scriptable from any shell.

Same 4-minute animated film that costs $300–$1000 on cloud video services runs here for the price of electricity. Hardware breaks even after about 40 films.

Watch the first DSL-rendered clip

First clip from a .sf script — rendered locally.

Short proof clip rendered straight from a Story Forge .sf script through the full pipeline — Flux still, LTX motion, Metal-accelerated attention, composited by ffmpeg. One command in, one MP4 out, nothing left the machine.

Watch the first film

The Bear Sister — a two-act animated saga.

Five open-source models composed by ffmpeg, 12 hours of M5 Max compute, zero cloud calls. The film above is the first production from the Story Forge pipeline — Act One in Studio Ghibli watercolor, Act Two in photoreal cinematic, stitched into one 4-minute saga with scored music, narrated by a warm storyteller voice, with title and credits.

The next thousand are scripts away.

Why it's different

What makes Story Forge different

🎞️

Five local models

Flux T2I + Wan i2v + Piper TTS + ACE-Step + ffmpeg. All open-source, all on-device.

🔌

Zero cloud

Nothing leaves the laptop. No upload step. No API charges. No rate limits. Ever.

📐

Scene-graph composable

Each scene = still + motion + narration. Change one, only that scene re-renders.

🔉

Warm storyteller voice

Per-sentence Piper + adelay+amix scene-sync + warm EQ chain. Bedtime-story quality.

Who it's for

Is this for you?

  • Indie filmmakers + animators who want a free, local, unlimited rendering pipeline
  • Parents making calm, sensory-friendly stories for kids — no flashing, no violence, no cloud
  • AI researchers building cinema-quality output from open models on Apple Silicon
  • Creators tired of cloud rate limits, subscription gates, and rights-grabby ToS
How to get it

How to forge a story

1

Write the scenes

One scene = one still prompt + one motion prompt + one narration line. Build a list.

2

Click forge

The pipeline iterates: Flux makes stills, Wan animates each, Piper narrates, ACE-Step scores, ffmpeg composes.

3

Watch your film

Final MP4 auto-opens in QuickTime. Title + credits + xfade transitions baked in.

Manifesto

We make our own rules.

We're not bound by upstream library defaults. We write our own DSL when JSON's too clumsy, our own Metal kernels when the vendor's path is slow. Cloud companies will tell you AI cinema needs a server farm. It doesn't. It needs a laptop, a script, and somebody willing to read the source.

What the cloud charges hundreds per film for, this pipeline does for the price of electricity. What people paid big data centers to run, we proved runs on a MacBook Pro on a kitchen table. We make our own rules. We build new things constantly. We make possible what people said wasn't possible.

Ready to forge your first film?

It's free, open source, and runs on the hardware you already own. Read the README, watch the first film, drop a star to help us keep building in public.

⭐ Get Story Forge on GitHub ← All Divine Tribe Software
For firms · Confidential workflows

Need this for a law firm, healthcare org, or anywhere documents can't leave the machine?

Story Forge runs the same on your firm's MacBook as it does on mine. AirGap AI is the commercial pilot — a 14-day engagement that ships Story Forge (and the rest of the local-AI stack) into a real legal/medical workflow with verified network audits. Confidential storyboards in, finished video out, never a byte to a cloud.

Explore the AirGap pilot → Get in touch
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Full technical docs

The complete README

Open the GitHub README — every detail, every benchmark, every code block

Story Forge

A local-only generative cinema pipeline. Animated films on one laptop. No cloud.

Story Forge takes a structured story description and produces a finished animated film — motion, narration, original music, title and credits — entirely on local Apple Silicon. Five open-source models composed by ffmpeg. Zero cloud calls. Zero API charges. Zero rate limits.

Full source, every benchmark, and every code block on GitHub →

The pipeline

.sf script → parser → resolver → emitter → .storyplan.json IR → render-route → ffmpeg

  • Flux 1 Dev — a still per scene (composition + character look)
  • Wan 2.2 i2v — hero motion (faces, action), native 5-second clips
  • LTX-Video 13B distilled 0.9.8 — atmospheric B-roll at 118s/clip on M5, ~5.6× faster than Wan
  • Piper TTS — warm storyteller narration through a deliberate EQ chain
  • ACE-Step — original instrumental score + per-scene SFX
  • ffmpeg — xfade stitch, sidechain-ducked mix, fades, mux

The .sf language

Story Forge films are written as .sf scripts — indentation-aware, comment-friendly, stdlib-only parser. A film is scenes; each scene declares its still, its motion engine, narration voices, music and SFX. render-route sends character/hero shots to Wan and atmospheric B-roll to LTX automatically, or you pin the engine per scene.

What's genuinely ours

  • LTX 13B distilled 0.9.8 on Apple Silicon MPS — likely the first public-confirmed working setup, via Lightricks' upstream multi-scale path.
  • Wan 2-step distillation trained on-device — we train our own step-distillation LoRA for Wan directly on Apple Silicon (not a data center) to collapse 4 denoising steps into 2.
  • An LPIPS-gated speedup harness — CI-style perceptual regression gates on every render optimization, so speedups can never silently degrade quality.
  • A compiled film DSL with deterministic IR + local multi-engine routing — a language for film, not JSON.

Why local

A full animated short with custom score and synced narration runs on one laptop you can carry in a bag. No upload step, no queue position, no subscription, no telemetry. What the cloud charges hundreds of dollars per film for, this does for the price of electricity.