A film editor built custom GPTs that test story paths through thousands of pages
A film editor turned huge interview transcripts into custom GPTs that tell them whether a narrative path is viable.
This film editor spent months hunting clip by clip for stories hidden in hundreds of hours of footage. During the program they built custom GPTs that read whole transcripts and answer one question fast: does this story path work? It is a lovely example of someone using AI to take the grind out of the craft they love.
ISAI Edit Assistant: Custom GPTs for Malvinas and SOX
Before
As a film editor, they faced insane amounts of filmed material and had to build a story from pieces that could fit together a thousand different ways. Watching hundreds or thousands of hours and adding clips one at a time to test an idea could take months. They called it slow, painful and a soul killer.
“It's a slow and painful process, a soul killer, having to watch dozens, hundreds, thousands of hours of material and then having to formulate a narrative that sometimes takes months to become viable, as I need to search for each clip and add a to one manually, to see if it makes sense.”
In their own words
The turning point
They decided to let AI hold the whole puzzle. They transcribed interviews with speakers identified, exported them, combined them into single markdown or text files, and wrote and rewrote the instructions many times. Then it clicked into place.
“With the app I made, all this is in the past and when testing a hypothesis, I just use the app and it tells me if the path I'm choosing is viable.”
In their own words
After
Now when they want to test a hypothesis, they ask their custom GPT and it tells them if the path is viable. They built one for a film about the Falklands War and another for the SOX project, plus a version on Poe. They are now developing a complete app with more functions, with plans to connect it to Descript and editing systems.
What it lets people do
The assistant lets an editor search across dozens of speakers and thousands of pages at once, pull the best moments, combine stories and compare how different people describe the same thing. It shortens the manual radio-cut stage so editors can spend more time on the story itself.
What they learned
Persistence with the setup paid off: preparing the transcripts and redoing the instructions was the real work. They see it as a start to improve little by little, and it has already given them back hours.
“Little by little I will improve, but it has already saved me many hours of work!”
In their own words
ISAI Edit Assistant: Custom GPTs for Malvinas and SOX was built during AI Mastery.
Read the full submission
Written 20 February 2024 Submitted by the storyteller
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