As a writer, comedian, actor and software engineer who can’t paint or direct, I’ve listened and laughed over and over again to the hundreds of audio sketches I’ve recorded as part of my comedy project, Planeta Moldova, over the years. Those sketches always screamed: show those crazy characters to me!
But I can’t draw. I’m not a director or a cameraman. We don’t get all the talents at once — and maybe that’s part of the great mystery of life. It’s what makes us curious about each other, what lets us see the world through different eyes.
So I wanted a tool that lets me, an artist, express myself in ways I naturally can’t. A tool that enhances my talents rather than replacing them. What if, instead of a brush that draws lines of color, I had a brush that draws entire images? What if I had an instrument that turns my voice into a storyboard? What if I could turn that storyboard into a movie?
That instrument is Planetanium.
The voice is the seed
Planetanium starts from the performance, not from a prompt. You bring the recording — the voices, the timing, the ideas — and the tool builds the film around it, synchronized to every word.
After some manual attempts at animating my old audio sketches, I noticed that the generated images, synchronized to the original audio, add another layer on top of our voices — but they don’t reduce them. They enhance those sketches and make them funny on yet another level. The voices and the ideas are still the core; the images give them another flavor. Characters that lived for twenty years only as voices finally have faces.
Making that actually work is where most of the research has gone. Generating one good image is easy. Generating a hundred that hold together as a story is the hard part: a character drifts to the wrong side of the room, an object appears out of nowhere, the world stops being consistent from one shot to the next. So Planetanium’s agent actually looks at what it makes. It sees the generated frames, catches the inconsistencies, and fixes them — keeping the characters, the objects and the world coherent across every shot, all synchronized to the original audio. The result isn’t a pile of pretty pictures. It’s a coherent animatic that holds together as a film.
The seeing is the art
I don’t mean throwing a prompt at the model and seeing what happens. I want to be the painter — in control of how the images are generated, how the story is storyboarded. I want to communicate my intention in every frame, and let the model handle the technical part of making the art.
Slop is what you get when you throw the AI at a problem and walk away — never looking, never verifying, accepting whatever falls out. That’s the exact opposite of what happens here. In Planetanium you watch the agent work on the timeline as the story takes shape. You point at a character, an object, a moment that isn’t right, and you tell the agent what you meant: fix this, change that, make it feel like this instead. The creativity was never in the prompt you throw in at the start — it’s in the seeing, the reviewing, the steering. That constant act of directing the output toward what you intended is where the art lives, and it’s exactly the step slop skips.
There’s a distinction between ‘art’ and ‘skill’ — in fact, there’s a big difference. AIs are good at the skill, but they are not artists. Art is an alternative modality by which humans communicate: the artist expressing a perspective for other humans to see and be inspired by. What matters most is the seed we put in: our ideas, our voice, our self — the part that wants to share what it feels about reality, life, love, justice. I want that to shine through and reach the audience the way only art can.
The machine has the infinite skill. The artist is still the one who sends the message into the world.
Who it’s for
Planetanium is for anyone with something to say.
If you already are an artist — an animator, an illustrator, a storyteller — it’s a wider brush: a way to reach past your own two hands and make more than one pair of hands ever could. And if you’ve never drawn a line in your life, but you carry a story, a joke, a truth that keeps knocking to get out — it’s the talent you were never handed. You bring the voice and the intention; the tool lends you the skills you don’t have, so that what you feel can finally take a shape other people can see.