The studio behind @simplyknownfacts
Video Creator
one idea in, one finished short out
Every SimplyKnown short starts as a single sentence and comes out the other end as a roughly one-minute narrated video — script, voice, artwork, animation, sound and captions. The assembly is automated. The judgement is not.
What gets made
One story, one minute
The channels publish short history and science pieces — a vanished Roman legion, a bridge that shook itself apart, a patent nobody read until it mattered. The rule is one story per video. Three names and four dates make a fact sheet, not a story, so a piece follows a single thread from beginning to end.
Two formats come out of the same workshop. Most are narrated shorts: a written script, a synthetic voice, original artwork for each beat, animated and captioned. The rest are fact cards — a short deck of researched facts on one subject, paced to how long each card takes to read.
The pipeline
Five stages, five places to say no
The production app moves each video through the same five stages. Every one of them stops and waits for a person, because the cost of a bad video is not the money, it is publishing something wrong.
Stage 1
Ideas
A subject arrives — from the public topic board, from what happened on this day in history, or from what people are currently searching for. It is researched against live sources, and a script is drafted and paced to the length of the finished video.
Human gate: approve the subject and the script, or send it back.
Stage 2
Curate
Artwork is generated for each beat of the script — one image per scene, plus a title card. They are laid out side by side and picked over: anything that misreads the moment, drifts off the subject, or simply looks wrong gets regenerated before it goes any further.
Human gate: choose the frames, or send scenes back for another pass.
Stage 3
Sound
The script is narrated, and the timing of every spoken word is measured so the captions and the picture changes land on the beat rather than near it. Background sound and any effects are mixed underneath, quiet enough to stay out of the way.
Human gate: listen to the mix; edit the words and re-record if the read is off.
Stage 4
Final
The still frames are animated, cut to the narration, and assembled into the finished vertical video with captions burned in. This is the expensive stage, so nothing reaches it that has not already been approved twice.
Human gate: watch it end to end. Approve, or reject and rebuild.
Stage 5
Publish
The approved video is queued for the @simplyknownfacts channels. Nothing posts itself out of nowhere — a person releases it, the same way the posting tool leaves the final press of the button to you.
Human gate: the last look before anything is public.
Being straight about it
Where the machine ends
The narration voice, the artwork and the animation are all generated by AI, and saying so plainly is part of the deal. What that does not mean is that videos publish themselves: a person approves the subject, the script, the frames, the mix and the finished cut, and can stop it at any of those five points.
- The history and the science are real and are researched against sources before the script is written.
- The images are illustrations, not photographs or footage of the events they depict.
- Titles are written to be interesting without giving away the ending — but not to promise something the video does not deliver.
- Found a mistake? Say so. Corrections are welcome and get made.
Two ways in
Get involved
Suggest a topic
Tell us what you would like to see and upvote the ideas already there. The most-wanted topics get built into shorts. Two open suggestions per person, one upvote per idea.
Post your own video
The posting tool this workshop built for its own shorts, open to any creator: send a finished file from your desktop straight to your own TikTok drafts.