CINEOSIS LABWORDS INTO FILM
COMPOSE / SEARCH / TEST

Shannon Engine

A film starts with a passage.Choose a poem, try a study, or bring your own words.
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Your words
Text, transcript or subtitles
Ways to compose

Let one image return with a different meaning. Establish two worlds and alternate between them. Begin with a destination and work backwards. Hold a place while the voice changes it. Use the same text to compare a direct reading with a contradiction.

CINEOSIS / POEMS / NEW VOICES

Poems as tests

Begin with Mark Anthony Thomas’s Where You Go When You Leave, then test what travels to other writing. Each work asks something different of the cut.

From Cineosis to composition

Cineosis Lab began by reading how images work: cinematic signs, archive passages and the relations made by cuts. Mark Anthony Thomas’s Where You Go When You Leave gave that work a concrete ground. Its poems, voices and foraged images let us ask what a film can do with a passage of language.

The Shannon Engine extends that question to a nursery rhyme, a meeting, a poem or a recorded voice. The intended result is a film with an opening, developing scenes and an ending. Search supplies material; composition gives it a history. A later shot can continue a place, challenge an expectation or recall something the viewer has already seen.

You set a direction and inspect the proposed scenes. The engine searches complete candidate paths, weights the ending against your destination, and extends selected shots with nearby footage from their source. You can replace a scene’s anchor, lock it, and compose again around that decision.

Why Shannon?

The archive supplies a repertoire. The words, the film already composed and your corrections narrow the next choices. This is an experimental use of constrained sequence selection, not a claim that information theory can determine cinematic meaning. Comparing the composed cut with independent retrieval makes the contribution of arrangement inspectable.

What this version can establish

Text and image embeddings use the same CLIP model. Cached test phrases open immediately. New phrases load a 65 MB text model and archive vectors, then run in a browser worker on your device. The local lab can also perform retrieval. Browser weights are compressed from the archive’s matching model; their numerical rankings can differ slightly from the full-precision cache. CLIP is strongest with English and cannot guarantee correct readings of arbitrary languages, negation or identity. Source neighbours support continuity; matching a place or a person across unrelated films remains an editorial judgement.

Entropy describes uncertainty among the retrieved candidates, not artistic merit. Surprisal is the negative log probability of a choice and need not be near zero for the top-ranked shot. A low similarity score is a reason to inspect the footage, not a calibrated verdict that the archive lacks it.

Recordings play alongside the cut. Timed subtitles supply exact scene intervals; plain transcripts use estimated timing. This version does not automatically transcribe an uploaded recording or render a final video file. Exports preserve shot IDs, source times, durations and held frames.

A test shelf, not a trophy case

Each work has a proposed compositional problem and a question for screening. Where the source text is not bundled, an original study brief is available and labelled as such. Paste the poem or your chosen translation to test its actual language. Reviews distinguish those trials, and no automatic count is presented as proof of meaning.

Cinematic signs · Syntagmas · The original poem films