Christian, Filmmaker, Former Disney Producer, Maker.
Sugar Hill, GA
Joined August 2020
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Fun project I concepted and directed @form_films - inspired by my nephew after catching a whiff of him at his football game. Haha!
Jeremiah Daws retweeted
Could not agree more. The most dystopian outcome of all is young people rejecting a technology capable of vastly improving their prospects.
Newer husband and dad here, and I'm feeling a tension I didn't expect.
I'm a film fan and aficionado. Movies recharge me, and they fill me back up creatively too. But by the time the girls are down, I'm too tired to start one, and some nights I fall asleep 20 minutes in.
If you're a parent who still makes time for movies, how do you do it?
New workflow: AI agents as my second unit. I hand off notes, refs and props at night, they generate while I sleep, and every morning I review dailies like a director checking second unit footage. Keepers go in the cut, the rest get notes. Anyone else running a night crew like this?
Watching through Star Wars for the first time with my wife and girls. George Lucas is a genius at building worlds.
What hits me now: inventing worlds used to be only for people with Lucas money. With AI I get to do it at my kitchen table. Dream come true!
AI filmmaking update: the client project we've been on is finally over the hump. We're out of building shots and into tweaks.
Generation gets you most of the way. The surprise has been how useful the edit side of Seedance is: pull a character out, move something, change one thing in a shot you already love, without rolling the whole take again.
Same with depth maps. Get a take where the motion and the camera move are perfect, lock that in, and you can still go back and change the performance.
Anyone else working this way? Has it held up for you? What are the pitfalls?
Built a little toy: Christmas 1992, the family den, the VHS shelf.
Slide a tape out, push it into the VCR, hit play. Weirdly satisfying VCR ASMR.
our-tapes.vercel.app
What tape did your family wear out?
Put up my dad's Christmas tree last night. November 4th. My family's going up mid-November.
Too early? I'm literally making a movie arguing it isn't. 🎄
I've been making AI films for a few months now. The biggest jumps in my quality and my process didn't come from a new model. They came from the last few days, after a few filmmakers started talking shop with me directly.
Voice tricks, dialogue direction, how they actually build a shot. Stuff you can't get from a tutorial.
I love this community. Thank you, you know who you are.
Marty playing Johnny B. Goode at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance is still one of the most perfect scenes ever made.
The cousin on the payphone. Marty taking it way too far. The whole room going silent. Then: "your kids are gonna love it."
What's the scene you'd rewind the VHS for every single time?
Been using depth maps of my best Seedance takes to lock the motion while I fix everything around it. Works great until the source take has stiff extras, then they come along for the ride. Anyone found a clean way to keep the camera and leads but free up the background people?
Seedance voice question for anyone who's cracked it.
I need an older guy who sounds proper, northern, kind of amused. Every take comes back the same generic old man. Tried describing it six different ways. Tried a black frame with no face, just the description. Same dude.
Next up is designing it in ElevenLabs and feeding that in as the reference. But has anybody actually gotten distinctive voices straight out of Seedance? What worked?
Seedance kept flipping my restaurant every time the camera turned.
What finally worked: block the move as grey boxes in Blender, feed that in as the camera reference, and let the character sheets + a 5-angle location sheet carry the look.
First real walk-around I've gotten. Previz still matters.
Spent an hour wondering why my gangsters kept standing in a straight line like a police lineup.
Then I looked at my reference sheet. It was a police lineup photo. Height chart and everything.
The model copies what you show it, not what you meant.
Jeremiah Daws retweeted
Right. Most of us don’t have access to the level of talent that would elevate our work. Hybrid is one tool in the arsenal, but it wouldn’t automatically give you better performances. All directing has to overcome limitations.
Had a long chat with Jordan Daniel Chesney @jordandchesney last night. Gracious guy. Generous with what he's figured out, no gatekeeping.
Spent all evening and into the early morning working on something new, inspired by him and others.
What stuck with me:
→ Put your rules at the very top of the prompt. The model weighs what it reads first.
→ Fewer reference pictures, more detail in the prompt. A few strong references and a lot of precise words beat a pile of images.
It's already making my shots tighter. Thanks, Jordan.
Jeremiah Daws retweeted
Correct. Get out and vote like the future of America depends on it.
Muslims have a plan to make America a Muslim nation.
Marxists have a plan to make America a Marxist nation.
Secular Progressives have a plan to make America a Secular Progressive nation.
… but Christians seem to always have a plan to keep Christianity from further influencing our nation by discipling people into either:
1) Political apathy (“God is sovereign, back off”, “we don’t get political, just do evangelism”)
2) Political ambiguity (“Jesus isn’t a Republican or Democrat, neither Right nor Left” = primary application of gospel to culture)
If continued, this will have very predictable (and disastrous) results in coming years, and a few conversations with pastors in deep blue cities / states trying to build churches, pastor people, and raise Christian families will help you realize it.
Two people asked me this weekend if my Halloween short was live action or AI. 🎃
It's 100% AI. No camera, no actors, no set.
21,000 views later, my favorite review so far: "Thanks, I hate it. (But it was great!)"
Thank you to everyone who watched and shared. Already working on the next one.
Tyler wouldn't take his little brother trick-or-treating. So 7-year-old Joey drew a face on a paper bag and went alone.
"Be back by nine."
What Are You Supposed To Be? A 104-second Halloween horror short, made entirely with AI. #HorrorShort