ToonyStory

ToonyStory turns a photo into an illustrated storybook. People assume the writing is the difficult bit. It isn't. The difficult bit is that a character has to look like the same person on page 9 as they did on page 1.

Image models do not think in characters. Each page is a fresh generation, and small drifts compound. Hair gets lighter. A face gets rounder. By the last spread you are looking at someone's cousin.

What has worked for us is treating one reference image as the authority for a character and forcing every later page to defer to it, rather than letting each page reinterpret a text description. Text descriptions are lossy. "Curly brown hair, green eyes, 6 years old" fits thousands of different children.

The other thing I learned the hard way: contact sheets lie. A grid of thumbnails is fine for checking colour and whether the right cast showed up, but it will happily hide a hand with six fingers. Anatomy has to be reviewed at full size or not at all.

Books can be read on screen, narrated as video, or ordered as a hardcover. Currently available in 12 languages.