Michael ZepedaDesign Director
← AI workflows & tools

Visual research / Application

Cinema Atlas

Product design / AI-assisted developmentPersonal practice

Cinema Atlas is a workspace for studying the visual language of film. Contact sheets, color studies, brightness timelines, and editing rhythms make a moving image available for close comparison, while poster and zine tools turn those studies into visual compositions.

My contribution

I connect my interest in cinematic atmosphere with a designer's way of reading images. Through AI-assisted development, I am building tools that let me move between individual frames, a film's larger patterns, and designed outputs.

What can a film reveal when its color and rhythm become visible at once?

From input to outcome

Study the film

Explore frames, color, brightness, and shot rhythm through focused visual studies.

Move across scales

Use the shared timeline to move from the full film to a time range or individual frame, keeping analysis and preview connected.

Compose the findings

Bring studies into posters and zines, with controls for layout, graphics, typography, and export.

Frame Palette

Choose a moment in a film and inspect the colors that shape its atmosphere. The frame, sampled palette, color proportions, and hexadecimal values stay together as a visual study.

Cinema Atlas Frame Palette workspace showing a selected Spirited Away frame and its sampled colors.
Frame Palette links a selected moment to its dominant colors, proportions, and hexadecimal values.

A season in color

Poster Studio brings an entire season into one composition. Each episode becomes a chronological color bar, making shifts in tone visible across the collection. Layout, spacing, typography, and export controls turn the analysis into a finished poster.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners full-season poster with ten chronological episode color bars.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners — all ten episodes of Season 2, arranged as chronological color bars in Poster Studio.

Inside the application

Actual app screens
Cinema Atlas analysis workspace with Dune contact-sheet frames and timeline controls.
A contact sheet and linked timeline connect individual compositions to the full film.
Cinema Atlas Poster Studio with a circular color barcode for Holes.
Poster Studio turns the film's sampled colors into an editable graphic composition.
An ornithopter above the dunes in Dune, paired with a sand and charcoal frame palette.
Dune (2021), 00:59:00. Sand, shadow, and the scale of the landscape.
Chihiro on a flooded railway platform in Spirited Away, paired with a blue and teal frame palette.
Spirited Away (2001), 01:37:59. Open water and sky create a quiet field of blues.
A night scene from Chungking Express paired with its blue and violet frame palette.
Chungking Express (1994), 01:30:20. Saturated night lighting brings blue and violet into the composition.

Application design and development: Michael Zepeda. Film imagery shown within the app remains the work of its respective filmmakers and rights holders.

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