Hey Y'all!

You've been on this Table Read Podcast journey with us, and we're thrilled to announce that the final act of the pilot episode has officially dropped! 🎉

In this last act of Survivors Don't Die, we dive into the crew's new life inside The Sanctuary District. Meanwhile, the fallout from Tim's unfortunate demise in the previous act leaves a lasting mark, building up to a cliffhanger we cannot wait to pay off in the next episode.

Shit gets cray—you don’t even know.

But, Amber, when’s the next episode coming out?!

I hear you, pal. We want it too. But here’s the deal: we need to make sure enough people are hyped for it first.

Once the season is greenlit with 10k downloads or paperback purchases, we’ll kick off production on the next episodes as books, audiobooks, podcast table reads, and more.

So if you haven’t cast your vote yet, what are you waiting for? Grab your free download of the Survivors Don’t Die Pitch & Pilot Book and let us know you’re ready for more!

We’re also cooking up some featurettes in the coming weeks to dive deeper into the story and promote the ebook, so stay tuned for those.

Thanks for sticking with us on this wild ride—we couldn’t do it without you. 💜

Hey Greenlighters! 🌟

The latest act of Survivors Don’t Die has just dropped! 🧟‍♂️✨ We’re testing out a unique podcast format where we perform our screenplay using AI voice changers—and we’d love to know what you think about it!

This time, the crew steps into the eerie sanctuary and faces some major moral dilemmas. What’s up with Amala? Is it too good to be true? And where’s Tim? Dive into the action and tell us your thoughts!

You can also download the full screenplay for Survivors Don’t Die at survivorsdontdie.com to follow along. Every download helps Greenlight this story into a fully animated series!

Hit play, share your feedback, and let us know: Would you trust the sanctuary? 🤔

👂 We’re listening,
Amber & JWall

The Survivors Don't Die Act 3 Table Read is out! This table read is the most action-packed sequence of events. Our team sets out to help whoever is on the other end of Rosie596. But their path is swarming with hive bees! Tim finds himself racing to save them all. 

This Act is the one where most of our screen tests come from. It's exciting to see how the screenplay influences what we see on screen.

Thanks for helping greenlight this project into a fully animated series. Every step brings us closer to making this show a reality! 🌟

We just dropped Act 2 of Survivors Don't Die! This episode ramps up the stakes as the crew battles dwindling supplies, mounting tension, and a horde of zombies hot on their heels—all while trying to reconnect with the outside world. In a gripping finale, the team's desperate broadcast finally gets a response: someone named Rosie596... but can she be trusted?

We also shared exclusive insights into the creative process, emphasizing the delicate balance of hope, survival, and trust that drives the story forward.

Thanks for helping greenlight this project into a fully animated series. Every step brings us closer to making this show a reality! 🌟

Alright, folks! 

The audiobook for Survivors Don't Die - Episode 1 took us about a month to learn how to do. We tinkered with different ways we could do voice changers with AI. We tapped a number of services and even trained some of our own RVC models with our voices. 

It was a grand learning experience that ended with us being BLOWN AWAY by ElevenLabs. An AI voice platform that is miles above the rest. 

We really enjoy working with this particular tool because it pays the actors that have trained their voices for every generation we do. 

Everything you hear was performed by us. Any dialogue was run through the voice2voice tools at elevenlabs and we got some pretty decent emotion. 

NOW, we've been tinkering with different ways to present the Survivors Don't Die Episode 1 audiobook. ACX/Audible doesn't allow for any AI voice productions on their site (unless you use their really shitty AI voice tool). Which sucks when you're using legitimate tools, but at the same time - I get it. 

Anyway, we're distributing it ourselves. Huzzah! 

We've got the full 1hr Audiobook experience on Spotify and on Youtube. We noticed that the hour-long audio-only video wasn't exactly engaging. 

Until...

Jwall had a brilliant idea to shorten the length of the stories into more bite-sized single-Act episodes for our micro-podcast. Because everyone needs a podcast now, or something, right? 

He even went a step above and edited together the actual book into the visuals for this one. 

We played with some usual podcast banter, lol, we'll get better. We promise. But we're excited to present each piitch and pilot this way in the future. 

Would love to know what you think on this one! 

- Amber & Jwall 

Welcome, to the new website! 

Today, we're thrilled to dive into our Survivors Don’t Die teaser trailer, giving you a behind-the-scenes look at the creative and technical process behind our latest peek into the world of Nuvitta.

From the initial sparks of inspiration to the AI magic that helped bring it all together, here’s everything that went into creating the teaser that’s got us counting down to October 31st!

Scene Breakdown & Inspiration

The purpose of this teaser was to immerse you into the tense world of Survivors Don’t Die and bring pages of our screenplay to life!

 Inspiration came from some of our favorite zombie films (Train to Busan and World War Z) and the suspenseful editing style of A Quiet Place.

While we had plenty of thrilling scenes we wished we could include, we focused on the strongest visuals to capture the story's core atmosphere.

Character Deep Dive

In this teaser, Yuki takes the lead as she’s swept up by the Hive's large drones, leaving viewers with questions about where she’s headed and what lies behind the massive walls of Nuvitta. We wanted to give glimpses into Yuki’s curiosity, Tim’s bravery, and Ji’s humor—each revealing hints of their personalities without too many spoilers!

Our original plan had more dialogue scenes, but we decided to dial it down to meet our Oct. 31 deadline. More trailers (and crazier videos) are on the way, and we can’t wait to reveal more about the full team.

Production - Production - Production!

Creating this teaser with just two of us was an exciting test of our skills! We knew we had to tackle Unreal Engine consistently, so we built a daily habit of 8-hour sessions to level up our animation chops. It was these consistent reps that allowed us to power through and bring this ambitious world to life.

As a two-person team, accessible tools like Unreal Engine, Blender, and Rokoko mocap were game-changers. With AI (like MetaHuman Animator for faces and some visual blending), we were able to handle high-quality, complex scenes much faster than we could’ve dreamed!

AI & Animation Process Insights

UE5 has been our animation workhorse, but with recent advances in AI video, we were able to supercharge the process! We ran some of the zombie and previs footage through Minimax, blending these visuals with our animated shots for a truly immersive experience. This AI pass was also key for polishing color correction and smoothing Metahuman textures.

AI in creative work has been a revelation, allowing us to speed up tasks and create visuals that hint at the epic scale we envision once greenlit.

Moving Forward

Up next? Even more promotional material and immersive sneak peeks! Our current goal is to reach 1,000 downloads of our pilot by year’s end to help make Survivors Don’t Die a fully realized series.

Is there a specific part of this world you’d love to explore further? Comment below, and let us know—we can’t wait to share more!

✒️SCENE 14✒️

Zola is checking on their grow house, while Oli is worried about their dwindling supplies. Tensions are rising!

This scene is in a sequence of "everyday life" scenes where we see how our five heroes have survived the last two years. In the sequence, we explore their food supply dwindling, their water and energy issues, and the uncertainty of whether fixing the Nuvitta Network is a good idea. 

Because two years is a long time when the world’s gone to shit, we felt like the sequence this scene falls into was important. How do they eat, what do they eat? Where do they live? What's their day-to-day like? How do these seemingly unconnected people work as a family unit? 

ZOLA & OLI

In this particular scene, we wanted to explore the subtle character dynamic between Zola and Oli, hinting at their friendship, trust, and fears—all with little dialogue. When you're around people who want to succeed with you, silence can be a powerful communicator.

It’s a simple scene on paper, but if done properly in the final edit, it provides a nice slowdown from the first act and previous action scenes. It also shows some nice independent and collective worries for each character regarding their dwindling supply situation. 

ANIMATING THE SCENE

MOCAP & SCENE PACING

Animating this scene was a fun one. It was our first "talkie." 

We needed to animate this scene to work through the production workflow of animating a talking scene with one mocap suit. 

How do you get audio into UE5? What does the pipeline look like to incorporate Eleven Labs Voice2Voice? 

We found that rehearsal was important so the timing when we got into the scene pacing wasn’t so terribly off. It was refreshing to discover the power of animating and editing for a shot; as opposed to animating for a scene. 

If we were shooting this live, we’d have shot it with a traditional coverage style of shooting. I'd have estimated at least half a 10-hour day, if not the full day, for this scene. 

With the real-time animation workflow, we were able to rehearse and mocap the scene in 2 hours and have pacing for the shot animation edit done the following day. 

ENVIRONMENTS

The big thing I wanted to dip into was the importance of environment building. The previous scenes were done with very sparse set design. While we’d made some strides with the actual workflow, it was important that we fill the room with stuff.

Having nanite and learning you can put blueprints inside of blueprints was a game-changer. So was having access to KitBash3D and Megascans. 

It was really important to get some depth in the scene. Ambiance helps create a particular character element that’s unspoken on screen, and we wanted to try our hand at it for the first time. 

SPRITES & FLIPBOOKS

This is a minor detail, but this scene helped us learn the power of the flipbook workflow in UE5. The little glowing screens on the lockers were our first little foray into animated screens for this project. The flipbook and sprite workflow was shockingly simple, and we'll definitely be using more of those. 

THE GROW ROOM

The choice to have this scene in a grow room served two purposes. We knew we needed to explain where their food supply came from. And we wanted to play with intense lighting.  

Because the team set up their bunker in a Network Building, we decided they’d made a home in an office building—a place with a lot of rooms, space, and fluorescent lighting. We also knew that because they were 100 years in the future, chances were they’d have some better growing techniques than present day. 

The other driving force for this scene was that we really wanted to emulate some of the lighting choices done in one of our favorite movies, Attack The Block. 

Jayson was adamant about using colored fluorescents in the scene, and doing so in a grow room was a nice homage/touch. 

In future renditions I'd like to explore adding more hydroponic systems hanging from the ceiling, maybe build out a wall unit and a water system that we could get cool inserts from. 

AI WORKFLOW

It was in this scene we realized we could do a pretty standard Stable Diffusion AI process on top of our characters. We’d tested SD in our previous scenes but did it for each shot, which was time-consuming and generally messy on the file management side. 

For this scene, we batched the entire sequence and then just spot cleaned frames where the AI might have given Oli a man's face or made Zola too feminine. Because we're editing image sequences, updating the shot was faster this way. 

The technique offers a subtle AI filter that just helps the Metahumans feel a little less plastic and a little more "squishy." It also does some really clever color correction that speeds up the process. 

The other AI technique that was fun to play with in this scene was the use of Eleven Labs' Voice2Voice option. We learned that when you rush lines or mumble things, the AI struggles to capture the emotion. But it did its job. 

It was also fun coming up with new lines and adding elements to the scene that weren't in the script. The "Computer play my jams" and "Playing Zola's jams" were a fun spice that helped the opening of the scene. And it was done with text-to-speech, something we would have had to ADR at a later date to make happen.

But with AI, we did it right in the edit. 

MOVING FORWARD

We learned some subtle things on this one, but I think when they all come together, they compound into more tools that will help us fine-tune this project into shape. 

Now, even though we tried our hand at interior environments, you can still feel the emptiness in the environment. I think adding more to the wall textures and filling some of the empty space in the frame with more “human clutter” will amp up the space a bit more.

There is also a desperate need to learn cloth simulation—the joint action in this scene is definitely in need of work. 

But not too shabby for the first pass. 

I'm excited to revisit this one when we circle back for the full production. 

THOUGHTS? 

What were your thoughts on this one? Any tips or ideas to make it better? Any feedback helps us become better so that when it comes time for full production of the episode, things smooth out, feel fuller, and look great. 

About Scene 13

• The purspose of scene 13 is that Tim and Yuki finally get the Nuvitta Network back on after months of hard technical problem solving. This scene is pivitol to the entire story because this is their moment that sparks everything else into action for the entire rest of the episodes. If the network signal didn't work at this time they would have never gone on their future adventures.

• The inspirations behind this scene was to see if Amber and I could act out all the characters individually then blend the performances back together to feel as if four characters were actually interacting at once.
  
  
• The visual of this scene was inspired by the reference photos from the script book. We wanted to get the moody lighting vibe with the large server racks behind them.
  
• We actually added a few lines in this scene that wasn't in the original screenplay just to add some more spice. Which line you think was added? Let us know in the comments.
  
  

Tim & Yuki Turn On the Network

• Tim & Yuki know this could be a huge communication signal to help find more survivors but Ji isn't interested in any new changes. 
  
  
• This scene develops the relationship between all four characters to show that Yuki & Tim are more connected and see Ji as a grump. Oli meanwhile is keeping everyone on task as the un-official bunker mom.
  
  
• The character choices that were improvised during production was at the end where Yuki & Tim high five each other. We added that while shooting to show their excitement and connection... but also secretly to see if we could animate the two character interacting inside of our 3D softwares. What do you all think of that frickin' hand clap!?
  
  

The Production Process

• The technical aspects of staging this scene was tricky from a production perspective because there's only two of us at our home studio, but we need to perform all four characters... It was fun to learn how all the separate performances needed to be captured for everything to line up properly. It was a challenging problem to try to solve.
  
  
• The challenges we faced with this project was lighting the scene properly. I don't think we captured the exact vibe we were going for but it still works. There's still a mountain of things to learn about 3D lighting characters. The journey continues.
  
  
• The main tools and software we used for this scene was Rokoko for the body motion capture, MetaHuman Animator for the face mocap, and Unreal Engine for putting the full scene together.  
  
  

The World

• The setting of the world is in 2123, two years after a zombie pandemic, and our characters are trying to find literally anyone they can talk to. Anyone!
  
• This scene is really the catalyst for the entire rest of the season and was an epic challenge to bring to life from the page to the screen.
  
  

AI & Animation Process

• A specific AI technique we used for this scene was changing all the actors voices. Amber and I acted out all the characters then we used Eleven Labs to transform into the actual actor voices.
  
  
• We got the look and layout of the server room from our script book photos that were generated with MidJourney & Stable Diffusion. This made set design so much easier and faster!

• We usually use an AI overpass as the final look of our scenes. But this is one of the only scenes we didn't add the AI overpass layer at the end. The picture is straight out of Unreal Engine. Can you notice any difference, if so let us know?
  
  

What's Next? 

• In the next scenes we want to figure out a way for the ai voices to carry more emotion when they are transformed into the characters. 

• Things we want to create more in the future are more character talking scenes. We usually do action scenes from the script for the trailers and promos, but it will be fun to do more slow, character-driven, scenes in the near future. Stay tuned! 

The Warehouse Scene - Scene 30-33

In this sequence of scenes, we experience Yuki on her own as she encounters the first Zomborg in the series. Zomborgs are individuals who have opted for cybernetic enhancements prior to being infected by the X80 virus. Now that they're zombies they are some of the most dangerous creatures we could possibly encounter. That is until Yuki is captured by a pesky Hive Bee. 

YUKI, TIM & ZOMBORG 1

This was our first Tim and Yuki scene. It was fun seeing them move around in an environment together. This is a moment for both of them where desperate situations call for them to separate. Tim places Yuki in a spot he thinks is safe while leading away the Hive Bee that was tailing them. Yuki's interaction with the Zomborg is one we wanted to feel terror-inducing. 

UE5 & THE ANIMATION 

This sequence of scenes was one that we had practiced with back in Sept 2023 as our Zomborgs Teaser Trailer. We thought it'd be a good one to circle back to and explore now that we're branded as Survivors Don't Die. What we realized was we could do so much we couldn't with the Move.AI pipeline. 

Soo... we've been busy these last few months getting our animation practice in. These four scenes are the result and we're so very excited to do more. We've come out of this sequence exploding with new ideas and a better understanding of the UE5 animation pipeline.

Unfortunately, we have yet to learn how to customize metahuman body meshes in the manner we want for the end product. So the Zomborg aspect of this edit doesn't really come through. Eventually, we want to update this particular zomborg to have bionic arms and legs seen in the screenplay. 

For this particular screen test we were really focused on capturing the chase aspect. Getting better acquainted with cameras and subsequences. Jayson took control of scene 30-31. While Amber learned on scene 32-33.  Both with equal merits and places to improve.

BIGGEST TIP

A big tip that helped was learning not to pre-set up all of your shots in a sequence. 

Instead, build as you go. Pace your animation and cameras for each moment you have mocapped. Then duplicate that shot for different camera angles. Treat each camera like it's own set up (like real life).  

DO NOT time your cameras to the animation like capturing a play with camera cuts.

You lose your ability to "cheat" the frame when you need to. By working in multiple shots with the same animation timing you can move props/walls/cameras/actors just like you would on set... in real life.

MOVING FORWARD

We learned so much working on these four scenes. Places for improvement and exploration include getting better at pacing in place mocap. We had to keep the camera really close as our feet were sliding all over the damn place. 

Character design upgrades in the wardrobe and hair department. Things still feel too "game-y." Eventually we want to learn how to customize metahuman bodies so we can get those mechanical arms on our metahuman.

Then there's the element of fine-tuning how we communicate with one another. We both have very distinct styles of shooting and we'll need to find a way to communicate our expectations for each moment. That way scenes feel cohesive. 

In the meantime, we'll continue doing test scenes! Let us know what scene you'd like to see come to life.