Personal project · 1 min 41 sec
Fifteen scenes written.
Ten survived.
A toddler and her companion ride a train through a safari that keeps getting stranger. The interesting part isn’t that AI generated it — it’s what had to exist on disk before any of it came back usable, and what got thrown away once it did.
The actual problem
A generator has no memory between scenes.
Every scene here was generated separately. Nothing carries over on its own — not the girl’s face, not the dog’s proportions, not the colour of the seats. Ask ten times for “a toddler on a train” and you get ten different children. So the film’s real production work happened before generation: building a set of locked reference sheets and attaching them to every single cut.
Character design
Locked before a single frame.
Each character was resolved as a sheet first — silhouette, outfit, palette, expression range — and that sheet became a required attachment for any shot the character appears in.
Ellie
The lead. Outfit locked early, pink held as the film’s only strong accent colour so she reads instantly against savanna gold and forest green.
Mochi
The companion. Small enough to be a reaction shot on demand — most of the film’s comic timing is cut to him rather than to Ellie.
The whale
The finale’s one impossible image. Sheeted separately from its hero pose so scale and glow stayed consistent when it finally arrives.
The safari set
Locked as a group rather than individually, so the herd shots stay in one world instead of three.
Props & locations
The set gets sheeted too.
Props drift as badly as faces. The teddy bear and the sticker book carry across scenes, so both were resolved as prop sheets; the cabin, the station, the forest and the finale lake were locked as plates before shooting into them.
The prompt template
Same seven headings, every single shot.
- Style — the render target, and what it must not look like
- Pacing — cut count and shot lengths, stated as a minimum
- Numbers — how many creatures, varied deliberately per scene
- Lighting — time of day and quality of light
- Color — the palette, and which colour is the accent
- Camera — frame rate, motion blur, movement vocabulary
- Acting — what the performance has to read as
Style: Pixar-style 3D animated feature film. Soft stylized CG — painterly warmth, high-end render. NOT photoreal, NOT plush or toy-like animals. Pacing: Lively but gentle kids-film rhythm. MINIMUM 5 cuts, lengths VARIED 2–5 seconds. This is the BREATHER scene between two loud ones — the comedy comes from SLOWNESS, but every cut still carries motion. No frozen pauses. Numbers variety: ONE lone sloth — the quietest, smallest-count beat in the film, placed deliberately between the zebra herd and the penguin colony. Lighting: Soft warm late-afternoon light filtering green through leaves, gentle and hazy. Color: Soft mossy greens outside, cream/honey cabin wood, teal seats; Ellie's pink is the accent. Camera: Calm and cinematic. 24fps, gentle motion blur. Static or the slowest drifts — let the sloth's slowness play.
Scene 7, “The slow gag” — verbatim from the shotlist in the prep kit.
What got cut
Five scenes died so the ending could work.
The shotlist planned a night sequence in three parts — a whale crossing the sky, plankton drifting into the cabin, a lullaby. Shot that way it sagged. All three collapsed into a single thirty-second generation cut to the last 28 seconds of the track, and the film got better by getting shorter.
1 · All aboard — the train pulls in, Ellie lights up, they board and settle.
2 · Safari reveal — she presses the giraffe sticker to the glass and the faraway giraffe comes close.
3 · Safari alongside — she feeds the giraffe; the elephant’s trunk boops Mochi.
4 · Pink wave — a thousand flamingos lift off, then the zebra herd thunders in below.
5 · Forest interlude — the film leaves the train for the first time.
5B · The swing — first-person vine swings over the roof, handing off straight into Peekaboo.
6 · Peekaboo — the monkey hangs upside down at the glass and mirrors her every move. The biggest laugh.
7 · The slow gag — a sloth drifts past at one-tenth speed. The breather.
8 · The losing race — a penguin colony waddling hopelessly to keep up, until one belly-slides past.
9 · Splash and rainbow — the elephant herd sprays the carriage; she draws in the fogged glass.
10 · The hinge — sunset burns to night, a whale crosses the sky.
11 · Sea of stars — plankton drift into the dark cabin; one lands on her fingertip.
12 · Lullaby — she falls asleep hugging teddy as the stars draw her animal friends.
8 · FINALE — all three night beats, rebuilt as one 30-second generation cut to the song’s final 28 seconds.
9 · Dream epilogue — one 20-second generation. The unicorn passes the window unseen, then she’s riding it through the stars, and the film closes on the same sleeping girl.
The look that outlived its scenes
Night material, kept for reference.
The mirror whale, the constellations and the plankton were all developed for scenes that got killed. The designs still fed the finale — which is why they ship in the kit rather than getting deleted with the scenes.
