# Film search, AI characters, and interactive stories. > Story & World Intelligence by Dream Awake Labs. We build tools to search films, connect scenes and characters, and create conversations and interactive stories from the source material. Story Engine is the system behind that work. The problem: A transcript misses much of what happens on screen. Search and character experiences also need to track who appears, what happens, and how scenes connect, with references back to the footage. Who it is for: For platforms, studios, and IP holders building search, character experiences, or interactive stories from their films and worlds. ## Film search and characters for Escape.ai On Escape.ai’s film platform, Story Engine watches each film once. The pipeline splits footage into shots and reads out time-coded captions, entities, events, dialogue, and narrative acts. Character grounding ties every appearance to one identity across the film. Those facts land in a typed story graph of scenes, beats, arcs, conflicts, and themes, with provenance on every node, so an enhancement pass can be reverted without losing what came before it. Search, character conversations, and interactive stories all read from the same graph. Answers include references to relevant footage, and agents can query and author the graph through a command-line tool and an MCP server. - A visitor holds a small token up to a wall-sized screen where a glowing, star-filled character reaches out a hand, while a small white robot on a desk beside her gestures toward the same screen. (One story, two bodies: a character on a screen and a small robot, driven by the same engine.): https://dreamawakelabs.com/technology/story-engine-character-and-robot.webp - Diagram: footage is split into shots, analyzed into time-coded captions, entities, events, and dialogue, tied to one identity per character, and enriched with beats, arcs, conflicts, and themes. All of it lands in a typed story graph with provenance, which feeds semantic search with citations, character agents with voice, agent orchestration, and interactive stories. Authoring tools for agents sit below. (From footage to a story graph, and what reads from it. Drawn by us; no film footage or screens.): https://dreamawakelabs.com/work/escape-ai-story-intelligence/pipeline.svg Case study: [Story Intelligence for Escape.ai](https://dreamawakelabs.com/work/escape-ai-story-intelligence.md) ## How it works - [Story Engine](https://dreamawakelabs.com/technology#story-engine): keeps a character to one identity across a film, records where every fact in the graph came from, and answers with time codes. - [DASP](https://dreamawakelabs.com/technology#dasp): is the open protocol designed to carry story decisions to engines and rooms as typed messages, so a scene can drive a screen, a headset, or a venue. - [Spatial OS](https://dreamawakelabs.com/technology#spatial-os): is designed to route a story’s cues to the devices in a room, so a projected character and a robot host follow the same scene. ## What we can build - **Video intelligence**: Shots, captions, entities, events, and dialogue indexed from the footage itself, each tied to its moment. - **Semantic search**: Questions answered with time-coded citations into the film. - **Story graphs**: A typed graph of scenes, beats, arcs, conflicts, and themes, with provenance on every node. - **Character intelligence**: One identity per character across a film, with persona and voice for conversation. - **World context**: Knowledge graphs that span several works and keep a world’s facts consistent. - **Narrative-driven agents**: Retrieval agents, multi-character scenes, and interactive stories that read from the graph and stay grounded in it. ## Projects - [Story Intelligence for Escape.ai](https://dreamawakelabs.com/work/escape-ai-story-intelligence.md): Story Engine on Escape.ai’s film platform: video understanding, a typed story graph, search with time-coded citations, and character agents. - [God’s Eye View at The Rectangle](https://dreamawakelabs.com/work/gods-eye-view-rectangle.md): A concept for exploring the Earth across a room through a voice-guided globe, public data, interactive projection, and a robot guide. ## Start with one film or series We index one film or one series into a searchable story graph and put a question-answering agent over it, so your team can judge the answers against the footage. What you get: A searchable story graph for one property, an agent that answers from it with references to the footage, and a short report on the results and gaps. What you bring: - The footage, with the right to process it - The questions your team or audience asks about it - One person to review the answers - [Discuss a story intelligence project](https://dreamawakelabs.com/start?from=%2Fstory-intelligence) - Email: hello@dreamawakelabs.com ## Other areas of expertise - [Interactive & Physical Experiences](https://dreamawakelabs.com/experiences.md): Experiences that respond to the people in the room. - [AI agents & business automation](https://dreamawakelabs.com/agents.md): AI agents for everyday business work. - [Synthetic data & digital humans](https://dreamawakelabs.com/synthetic-data.md): Synthetic data for training and testing AI. - [Multiplayer game development](https://dreamawakelabs.com/multiplayer.md): Multiplayer games and the servers behind them. - [Agent-Ready Web Applications](https://dreamawakelabs.com/agent-ready-web.md): Web apps for people and AI agents. - [Digital Twin Simulation](https://dreamawakelabs.com/digital-twins.md): Simulated people, spaces, and systems in a game engine. - [Custom engineering](https://dreamawakelabs.com/software.md): Engineering for the parts no off-the-shelf product covers.