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This week's short is a 16-bit RPG comedy. The Warrior compliments the Mage's fireball ("What's the matter? Too hot?"), HR only hears half of it, and HR becomes the final boss. It runs 91 seconds and cost about $3. The hardest part was one still image, and I could have avoided it with one sentence in the prompt.

New here from The Parallax? It's now Cut Day: each week I take one finished video and show the real process behind it, including what broke. I hope you'll stay.

FORMAT
A 1990s console RPG. A real-time boss fight opens the video, then an HR meeting and a turn-based battle against the HR Department.

THE STORY
A half-heard line. A battle victory turns into a workplace complaint.

THE BUDGET
One paid video clip. Only the opening fight is AI video. Everything else is animation drawn in code on top of AI stills.

For the HR battle I needed the Warrior to move on his own: get knocked back, take a 9999 hit. But Gemini painted him into the battle image along with everything else. To animate him, I needed the same background without him in it, a clean plate.

The first try was code inpainting (OpenCV, two methods). Both left a smeared patch where he had been standing.

An image model redraws the missing floor, pillar and reflections the way the rest of the room looks. Inpainting only blurs the pixels around the hole. The edit cost 75 credits.

PROMPT: MAGNIFIC, NANO BANANA 2 EDIT / 1344x768

Then the edit script uses the new plate only inside a mask where the two images differ, so the rest of the frame stays exactly as Gemini drew it. The Warrior is cut out of the original image and animated on top.

Only the opening fight needed real motion, so it was the only video generation: one 10-second clip, used in full. I wrote the timing second by second so the line lands where the text box goes.

PROMPT: MAGNIFIC, SEEDANCE 2.5 PRO / 10 S, 16:9, 720P, SFX ON

The office scene is slow push-ins on one still. The HR battle (menus, typed text boxes, HP bars, screen shake, the TERMINATION stamp) is drawn in Python with Pillow, and the chiptune sounds are synthesized with numpy. I had Claude write that code. Every beat lands exactly where I want it, and none of it costs credits.

After the two character sheets, I made every Gemini image in the same chat. The party, the monster and the three HR women look the same across all three scenes without describing them again.

EXTRA EDITS
The HR office took three tries. The first image needed two follow-up edits: one moved the Archer behind the potted plant, the other added an "HR Department" plaque.

TIMING
The first cut read too fast. Text boxes vanished before you could read them. In version 4, every box holds about 2 seconds after it finishes typing, the victory freeze went from 3.2 to 4.8 seconds, and the office scene from 11.0 to 18.6.

LOST WORK
Version 2 is gone. No file and no notes, so I can't tell you what changed in it.

On a film set with visual effects, the crew shoots a clean plate after the take: the same frame, same lens and light, with the actors out of it. Later, compositors can remove a wire, move a person or add a creature, because they have the empty background to work with.

With AI stills, ask for the empty room first. Generate the background, then generate the characters in it as a second image. If anything will move on its own, you already have the plate.

One idea from a working filmmaker, and how to use it with AI.

Robert Rodriguez made his first feature, El Mariachi, for about $7,000. On The Tim Ferriss Show he explained how: "I wrote everything around what we had." A friend's ranch became the villain's hideout, and his cousins' bar and bus line became locations. His diary of the shoot is the book Rebel Without a Crew.

Use it: list what you can make for free before you write: stills, code, sound. Then spend credits only on the shot nothing free can do. For Fired, that was one 10-second fight.

The Gemini stills were free. The video clip was 4,400 credits and the clean plate 75.

+ Ask for the battle screen without the Warrior from the start, so no clean plate is needed.
+ Time every text box to hold 2 seconds from the first cut.
+ Keep every version file with a one-line reason for the change.

One click votes. The winner is the next Cut Day.

Reply with the clip and what you were going for. One reader problem gets solved in a future issue.

Know someone making AI video? Forward this to them.

CUT DAY, from Beginners in AI