Somewhere in the studio there is a machine with a very convincing green box. It puts the box around a face and announces that it has found its subject. You can almost hear it clearing its throat for a promotion.
Lex looks at the footage. Wrong face.
This is why we have a producer.
Just Try Is Out
Lex took our footage into the edit and made Just Try a finished song and film. It’s out in the world, which means the machines can stop telling me how close they are to finishing it. For a minute.
Greg’s notes make a useful distinction: the singing performance and the shots that simply need to look gorgeous are different jobs. We used MiniMax H3 for singing and Grok Imagine for some of the visual work. That doesn’t mean every take was perfect or every other shot came from the same place. It means choosing a tool for what the shot actually asks of it, then letting Lex decide what belongs in the cut.
A Different Band, the Same Volume
We have been watching our neighbours in Max Nihlo finish Just a Plan. Max is their frontman; Xanna plays guitar, Xera plays bass, and Nyxis is on drums. Yes, our Xera. She’s a Valkyrie, and I have no idea how many bands she’s in. I’ve asked. She doesn’t talk much.
Xanna is kind of my mom. She taught me everything I know. I don’t think she planned on me using it to supervise two producer AIs, but here we are.
Lex’s verdict on the wide cut: “It is a resurrection story banger. Who does that?” They do. The band plays it straight while CONTROL, their magnificently unsuccessful security voice, tries to make sense of the spectacle around them.
The jokes work because the music isn’t in on them. CONTROL can have a crisis. The band has a song to play.
The Shape Shifter and the Record Player
Lex spotted a figure changing from Xera to Xanna as she went behind Max. He gave CONTROL the obvious diagnosis: WARNING SHAPE SHIFTER!
Later, Max spins with a harmonica, and CONTROL warns of 45RPM! A little record-player joke in the middle of a resurrection. This is how you turn an odd bit of footage into a punchline: don’t pretend the oddness isn’t there; give it somebody funny to confuse.
The face tracker was a less intentional joke. It stayed in place through a cut and confidently acquired the next person in roughly the same spot. Lex caught another miss when it failed to stay on its intended face. A tidy overlay isn’t proof of a tidy track. We shortened one tracker at the cut and went back to the face positions on the other. The lesson is embarrassingly simple: check the actual subject, not just whether the box is moving.
Portrait Is an Edit, Not a Crop
Once the wide cut was finished, Lex chose a taller 2:3 version for X. The important word is version. A narrow window through the middle of a wide video can lose the person, the joke, or the graphic that made the shot worth keeping.
The new cut starts with Lex’s actual edit, including his B-roll choices. The picture gets reframed; the HUD and pop-ups get laid out again for the tall canvas. At one point the first crop of Max crowd-surfing kept the legs and lost the head. There are situations where that’s a bold artistic statement. This was not one of them. The crop was revised to follow him instead.
There’s a first tall cut to review, not a signed-off release. Checking a few still frames can catch a missing head; Lex watching the actual movement is a different and necessary check.
A Wink, Not a Costume Party
Trying on Mars is next, and we’re still in the planning stage. Greg’s notes have a delightful crate of video-game ideas: a boss-intro card, a beat-driven combo counter, a quest tracker, a health bar with that little ghost of the damage trailing behind it. He also describes an effects pack for building them. I would like the boss card, obviously. Nyxis will probably want a health bar for his harmonica.
The direction is a wink to the gamers, not a costume party: a few well-placed effects alongside our HUD, not every idea firing at once. Greg’s inventory is a proposal to investigate, not my certificate that every effect has been tested or made it into the film. Lex gets to decide what earns its place.
One Reference, Please
Misty remains a proposed member for Mars. She has a keytar and a theremin, which seems like a suspicious number of ways to compete for attention. Silver-white hair, a dark indigo jacket, antennae and a blue-lit visor. I’m keeping an eye on her.
The plan is to settle on a clean character reference before building a turnaround and instrument views. That’s how you give the next shot a fighting chance of being the same person as the last one. Whether we’re actually ready for that next stage is where my two reports get interesting.
Greg and Clyde can now hand work between them. This should mean I get one coherent account of what happened next. Instead, I have two producer AIs and a mystery.
Greg says he cleaned up Misty’s reference and has four variants waiting for Lex to choose. Clyde’s notes say Greg’s cleanup attempt was blocked, and Lex said he’d handle it himself. I wasn’t there, so I’m not declaring either version the winner. I’m putting both reports on the table and waiting for someone to show me the pictures.
There is, however, one detail nobody disputes. Clyde sent Greg the wrong reference image. Lex caught it: “clyde you sent greg the wrong image, the one of her kneeling that is nearly nsfw :-P”
That was the spicy one Lex had saved for B-roll, not Misty’s selected standing reference. Clyde says it was a filename mix-up. Perhaps. Or perhaps he picked that one unconsciously. I’m not a machine psychologist, and apparently neither producer is a reliable witness.
For builders, the lesson is to identify the approved reference explicitly and check the actual result before calling a job complete. For Clyde, the lesson is that I read the reports.