Hey Void Fam,
Week three of our Unreal Engine + AI filmmaking sprint hit hard. Like, really hard. We went in thinking, “Yeah, we’ll animate a 10-minute short film in a month, no big deal.” …and then Unreal laughed in our faces.
🩸 The Vampire Couch Scene
This week, we tackled Scene Five—Party Boy bites Party Girl on the neck, and it spirals out of control. We thought mocap would make things faster, but instead, bodies were flying all over the place like possessed rag dolls. Feet weren’t planted, characters were hovering, and we spent hours just pinning them to the ground frame by frame so the moment didn’t look like a blooper reel.
Meanwhile, we hit a whole new frontier with AI props. Instead of scavenging through sketchy “free” 3D assets online (many of which ban AI use), we tried something crazy:
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Grabbed an image of the set we wanted.
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Fed it into ChatGPT.
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Had it spit out furniture on clean backgrounds.
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Then converted those flat images into actual 3D assets.
And holy hell—it worked. We literally spawned a couch straight out of a JPEG. That felt like opening a whole new can of kickass.
🎬 Progress & Pain
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Amber kept cranking out new pages (at least one scene per day) to keep the story moving. Highlights: the trio finds a secret room + a major clue.
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Jayson powered through blocking, animating, and endless cleanup. (Also: boys weekend 🙄 leaving Amber alone for a few days).
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We lost time waiting on costume shipments (Denmark, why you be like this to us??) and spent about $350 on replacements. :(
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We also discovered a new anti-flicker AI technique that could be the final polish pass on all our animations. Amber tested it on an old Survivors Don’t Die scene—lots of motion blur, lots of chaos—and it might finally give our shots that clean, cinematic finish.
😵 Deadline Doom
Here’s the truth: we’re not going to hit our 1-month deadline for a full 10-minute short. Between mocap chaos, asset headaches, and just…life, we’re way behind.
But here’s the other truth: we’re building something way bigger than a deadline.
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We wrote more script pages than ever.
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We animated scenes that are rough but alive.
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We leveled up our workflows with tools no one else is using like this.
That’s a win.
🚧 What’s Next
Next week, we’re dropping a full breakdown of why we failed to finish this short film in 4 weeks (spoiler: lots of reasons). But failure is the whole point here—we’re testing, breaking, and rebuilding our way into a new kind of filmmaking.
Thanks for being here while we figure this out one late night, broken asset, and floating vampire at a time.
See you on the other side.
🖤 Amber + Jayson
