bkingfilm/lapian-notes

Lapian Notes is a tool for people who want to study how movies are put together, scene by scene. It turns a film file into an editable notebook by pulling a screenshot roughly once per second through the whole movie, reading any subtitles embedded in the file or searching for them online if none are found, and packaging the screenshots and subtitles into a ZIP file. Instead of relying on a built-in AI service, the tool asks the user to hand that ZIP file to whatever AI chat tool they already use, such as ChatGPT, along with a ready-made set of instructions that gets copied automatically. No API key or paid subscription to the tool itself is required. Once the AI responds with a JSON file describing the movie's structure, the user imports that file back into Lapian Notes, which then builds a multi-line timeline of the story's different plot threads, a tree showing how scenes group into main plot, subplots, emotional beats, and information beats, and a curve estimating how engaged an audience would be at each point in the film. From there, a user can click any timestamp in their notes, a script excerpt, or a subtitle line to jump the built-in video player straight to that moment, and play just that one segment before it automatically pauses. Every segment also has an editing panel for writing notes about its purpose, key beats, and creative intent by hand. Individual segments can be sent back to the AI on their own for a more detailed shot-by-shot breakdown. Finished notes can be exported as Markdown, as script text, or as a shareable long image of the full timeline. The README warns that free AI tiers sometimes cannot handle thousands of screenshots from a full movie and may only look at a few images before responding, producing a thin result, and suggests asking the AI to redo the analysis in full or switching to a different AI if that happens. Everything runs locally in the browser, with notes saved to local storage and screenshots cached locally, so no film or note data is uploaded anywhere. The current interface is Chinese-only, though an English README is provided. It requires no programming to run, just downloading and double-clicking a startup script, and is released under the MIT license.