Concept note · the lab vocabulary
Live adaptation
A story filmed as it is read: the text goes in, the film comes out, and the reader is free to change what happens.
What it is
Adapting a text to film at the moment it is read rather than once, in advance, by a studio. The text is the script; a pipeline reads it whole, fixes its people, places and look, and renders it shot by shot just ahead of the viewer. Because the film is made from the text as it stands, it can be made from any text — and from text that is still being written, by the reader or by players in a game.
In the lab
- Unbound →
- A colour reader reads the whole book, casts its characters with the friends on the sofa, and films it while it plays — then lets them step in, say anything, and keep going past the end of the page.
Our position
A film adaptation is one reading of a book, fixed forever. A live adaptation is a reading that can be different every time: cast with the people watching, styled and scored to taste, and open at any point to a choice the author never wrote. The two things that make it hold together are continuity — every shot built against the same plates of the same faces and rooms — and a world that stays bounded while the actions inside it are not.
Honest limitations
Generation is slow next to playback; a live adaptation runs on a buffer, and free choice runs on a ladder of cheaper media until the film catches up. Every rendered second costs money, including the ones never watched. Continuity is only as good as the reference plates and the agents checking against them, and what can be rendered is set by each provider's policy.
The experiments are the proof
Every claim in this note is made concrete somewhere in the lab — the idea exists because the machines needed it.
The map of the lab →