Journal

When I was nine, I made a Halloween costume out of a bedsheet. It was bad. Everyone else had real costumes - polished, store-bought. Or nothing. Mine was a sheet with holes in it and painted over it.

At school they ran a contest for best costume. An older kid pointed at me and laughed - and picked me. Not because it was good. Because I'd actually shown up in the thing. The whole room laughed.

I felt two things at once. A flash of pride. Then the burn of being laughed at. And underneath both, a decision: next time I'll come back with the best costume. I'll show them.

I kept that promise for thirty years. I only ever let myself be seen when I was the best in the room. I built a world-class product, flew across the world for it, got the patent, stood on expo stages. Every time I was undeniable, it felt incredible. And every time something of mine wasn't yet the best, I hid it, or quit it, or buried it until it was polished enough to be safe.

That instinct made my work good. It also made me invisible. You can't build an audience if you only appear when you've already won.

So this year I'm breaking the rule on purpose.

I'm making 12 sci-fi short films - one a month. I'm publishing each one and showing how I made it. The early ones will probably look like the bedsheet. I'm publishing them anyway.

The costume gets better every month. Come watch.

I just exported a 10-minute animatic for the first episode of my sci-fi series. It was built in 15-minute burst-modes between freelance dev work and family life.

Because the "AI film" space is the wild west, I want to establish a public record of exactly how my custom app (Alchemist) and I built this.

The Hybrid Process:

Hand-Drawn First: Every single one of the 400+ shots started as a physical sketch. I manually designed the original compositions, poses, camera angles, and spaceships.

AI as a Digital Brush: It took a few weeks to push these 400+ sketches through Alchemist (using the kie.ai API) to convert them into digital renders. The AI doesn't generate scenes from thin air - it acts as a style transfer over my exact drawings.

The Edit: Once rendered, I brought everything into DaVinci Resolve. The timing, dialogue structure, sound design, and emotional pacing were all manually cut by me.

The AI is the ink, but the composition and storytelling engine are 100% mine.

Below are a few examples showing the original hand-drawn compositions right next to the final AI-assisted style transfers. Now that the timeline is locked, I'm stepping away to bill some freelance dev hours and sending the private cut out for feedback.