SlopOpera

• generative video
• screen production
• serial drama

Twelve weeks take you from an empty GPU to one finished pilot episode: one shot, one hook, one episode. Each week adds exactly one technique to the rig, and no week repeats another.

The four phases

• Weeks 1–2

  The Rig

  Getting the rig running on a VRAM or credit budget, where the graph is the artefact and a clip only counts once it can be made a second time.

• Weeks 3–6

  Four Generators

  Four generators, anime-first: text to image, image to image, text to video, image to video, in that order.

• Weeks 7–9

  Holding It Together

  Three ways of holding a story together across shots — your own workflow, continuity, and the storyboard.

• Weeks 10–12

  The Episode

  One sixty-to-ninety-second episode, taken from a shot queue through assembly to a platform's delivery spec, and the series bible it leaves behind.

• One canvas

  The Studio

  The whole rig as one canvas: every recorded input, the take it produced, and the line between them.

• Six doors

  The backlot

  The six links at the top of this page as six doors, with the room the recordings came off behind the Studio one.

Twelve decks — the slides each lecture is delivered from, one per teaching week.

What this course believes

The machine shoots; the human decides what survives. A shot that cannot be gotten twice is not technique, however it turned out the one time it worked. The first three seconds and the release calendar are the two clocks the semester runs on — one decides whether a viewer stays, the other decides whether an episode is due.

What you leave with

A finished pilot — sixty to ninety seconds, hooked in its first three and held together to the end — and an account of what its bible should carry into a second episode. A rig — the workflow graph, saved, not just the frame it produced — that runs the same shot again on a different day. And a production log detailed enough that someone who was not in the room could rerun it and land on the same result.

What you need

No prior experience with generative video, screenwriting or editing is assumed: week 9 teaches the script and the storyboard, and week 11 teaches the cut. What the course does assume is that you can install and run software on your own machine, and keep files in an order that lets a log written in week 2 still mean something in week 11.

Hardware is whatever you bring: your own graphics card, or a booking on the school's shared render window if you don't have one worth bringing. No minimum VRAM is guaranteed either way. If you have neither a card nor a booking, the other shape of rig is an account with a credit balance: a metered API key is a rig too, and the course treats the two as interchangeable inputs to the same discipline. What the anime-first ramp buys is time — the stylised work of Phase 2 is lighter than the photoreal work of Phase 3, so a mid-range card clears the weeks it can handle before the course asks more of it. Full terms, including the booking rules, are under equipment and compute.

Teaching team

• Vera LinConvener

  Eleven years writing for a daytime soap before the jump to vertical drama; runs Monday lectures on a schedule that does not move for a rewrite.

• Dutch MeridianTutor

  Thirty years directing commercials on the conviction that only the first three seconds are watched; runs Dailies with the same stopwatch.

Assessment at a glance

1. A33%
2. A43%
3. A53%
4. A63%
5. A73%
6. A83%
7. A93%
8. The Pilot35%
9. Dailies Participation24%
10. The Showcase20%

• A3 · 3%
• A4 · 3%
• A5 · 3%
• A6 · 3%
• A7 · 3%
• A8 · 3%
• A9 · 3%
• The Pilot · 35%
• Dailies Participation · 24%
• The Showcase · 20%

All ten pieces

Policies · People