Aisha-Aliyu/gatanan

AI Showrunner for African Folktales # Gatanan Gatanan turns a written folktale into a narrated animated short film. You give it the text of a tale, and a small team of AI agents reads it, plans the film shot by shot, and generates the artwork. The pieces are then cut together into a finished short. The first one comes from a Hausa *tatsuniya* I grew up hearing: "Gizo and the Never-Empty Clay Pot," a story about greed. I narrate it myself, and it opens the way these tales always open, with a call to the children and their answer back. ## Why this exists Almost none of Africa's oral traditions have made it into the tools we are building AI with. Hausa tales are told out loud, at night, by an elder who starts with "Gatanan gatananku." The children answer "Ta zo mu ji ta," and only then does the story begin. I wanted something that could carry a tale into film without sanding that off: keep the names, the clothing, the place, and the lesson, instead of redrawing everything as something Western. ## How it works Each stage is a separate agent with one job, and every one of them runs on Qwen Cloud. ```mermaid flowchart TD A[Folktale text tales/*.txt] --> B subgraph P[Gatanan pipeline · Python] B[Griot writes the Story Bible] --> C[Story Bible characters, beats, moral] C --> D[Director writes the Shot List] --> E[Shot List shots + narration] E --> F[Cinematographer draws each shot] --> G[Keyframe images] end B -. calls .-> Q D -. calls .-> Q F -. calls .-> Q Q[(Qwen Cloud · Alibaba Model Studio)] G --> H[Editor · FFmpeg motion, timing, sound] N[My narration + Hausa call and response] --> H S[Nature ambience] --> H H --> M[Final film gatanan.mp4] ``` **The Griot** reads the folktale and writes a Story Bible: the title, the moral, the characters and how they should look, and the beats of the story in order. Its one rule is to stay true to where the tale comes from and never Westernize it. **The Director** takes that Bible and writes the Shot List: what we see in each shot, how the camera moves, and the …