Cracking Character Consistency: A Storyboard Pipeline That Actually Works
We finally solved the character drift problem. A video-first pipeline, a custom review app, and all 9 Scene 1 panels generated for under $1. Here's how it works.
Read More →Production Blog
Updates, insights, and lessons learned as we build an animated film with AI-assisted tools.
Storyboard Deep Dive: 12 Hours Chasing Consistency
I spent an entire day trying to generate usable storyboard panels for one scene. Scene-specific turnarounds, ControlNet experiments, Blender mockups, and four major rewrites. Here's everything I tried and what actually worked.
Read More →Weekly Diary: Mar 2–Mar 9
P-Video pipeline progress, new animatics from AI-generated frames, and automating production reporting with weekly-diary.sh.
Read More →80x Cheaper Video: P-Video Pipeline and New Animatics
We built a model-agnostic video generation layer, discovered P-Video as an 80x cheaper alternative to Veo, and assembled full animatics for Scene 1 and Scene 3.
Read More →Scene 1 Moves: From Storyboards to Animated Footage
We animated all 9 Scene 1 panels with Google Veo, set up a ComfyUI GPU pipeline on RunPod, and stitched together our first rough animatic. The movie is moving.
Read More →How Do You Make Her Act?
Mia can walk now. But walking isn't acting. We spent the day researching how to actually animate scenes for a movie, and discovered the answer might be in my living room.
Read More →She Walks
Three days after our rigging disaster, Mia finally moves. The answer was embarrassingly simple: stop fighting the tools and let Meshy do everything.
Read More →Rigging Reality Check
We spent all day trying to rig Mia for animation. Four different approaches. Four different flavors of failure. Here's what happened.
Read More →Trailer Posted
We posted the trailer. It's not good. But it's out there, which is the whole point of this learning in public thing.
Read More →The Pipeline Solidifies
Day 10. The production pipeline from concept art to 3D models is real. PBR textures, Meshy integration, website fixes, and five lessons from the first third of pre-production.
Read More →From Flat to 3D: Our First Character Models
All seven main characters now have 3D models. We tried TRELLIS, Meshy, and Hunyuan3D. Leo came out flat. Here's the full story of our first day in three dimensions.
Read More →Assistant Director Takes the Night Shift
Six PRs merged while I slept. An AI assistant director ran overnight, regenerating 27 storyboard panels for character consistency and fixing website infrastructure.
Read More →Character Lock Complete: All Seven Characters Approved
Every main character now has an approved turnaround sheet. Here's how we got there, what we learned about Ruben, and why character consistency is the hardest problem in AI-assisted animation.
Read More →In Praise of Ugly-Cute: Designing a Dinosaur Nobody Asked For
Jetplane gets his look through three rounds of fighting AI's desire to make things pretty. Plus: four character designs locked and a breakthrough in keeping characters consistent across storyboard panels.
Read More →The 3/4 View Problem (and How We Fixed Everything Else Too)
Fixing character turnarounds with Gemini 3 Pro image-to-image, consolidating our generation pipeline into one script, migrating to R2 storage, and setting up parallel agent workflows.
Read More →27 PRs in One Day: The Movie Has a Shape Now
Character turnarounds, environment concepts, a full animatic, trailer storyboard, color script, sound design, VFX reference, and Twitter setup. February 4th was intense.
Read More →Building QA for AI: When Your Robot Needs a Report Card
Creating a quality assurance pipeline for AI-generated assets with automated validation and human review checklists. Plus continuing Act 2 storyboard regeneration and fixing infrastructure issues.
Read More →Storyboards Go Sketch
I redid all the Act 1 storyboards. Made them worse on purpose. Turns out pretty pictures hide bad storytelling.
Read More →Day 1: From Zero to 106 Storyboard Frames
I made 106 storyboard frames today. That feels impossible to type. Also got base models for four characters. Here's how day one went.
Read More →Welcome to Rex Marks The Spot
I'm making a movie with AI. Is this a good idea? I don't know. But I've been sitting on this screenplay since 2019 and I'm tired of waiting.
Read More →Blender + LLM Integration
I need Blender to do what I say. So I'm connecting Claude to it. Does this sound insane? It felt insane when I started.
Read More →The Screenplay is Done (For Now)
I wrote this screenplay years ago. It's been sitting on a hard drive ever since. Now I'm actually making it.
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