BAD ACID

The Brief

The 48 Hour Film Project is exactly what it sounds like: write, shoot, score, and finish a film in a single weekend. Every team draws a genre from a hat and receives the same three required elements, a character, a line of dialogue, and a prop, that must appear in the finished piece.

I went in with a plan and a constraint of my own choosing: work completely alone, and use the 48 hours to push everything I'd been learning about generative tools into a single finished piece. The generative models of 2023 were limited, but I'd tested them enough to know one thing for certain. They were extraordinarily good at unreliable, trippy, unsettling imagery. So I was hoping to draw horror or sci-fi. I drew horror.

The required elements were the same for every team: a character named Bobby the truck driver, the line "ask yourself one question: do I feel lucky?", and the prop, adhesive tape.

The Concept

The story arrived almost immediately, because the technology suggested it. A man goes off to a cabin in the woods to take acid alone, an attempt at introspection. The horror comes from what he finds looking back at him. The film's structure mirrors its own production: it opens in traditional filmmaking, clean digital footage shot on a Panasonic S1, with the walk through the forest captured on a Kandao 3D/360 camera for a more immersive, unmoored feeling. As the trip takes hold, it dissolves into fully generative imagery. The medium becomes the descent.

Bobby, the mandatory character, became the externalization of the protagonist's deepest fears about himself. Left to my own devices I might have cut that requirement entirely, but watching it back years later, the forced element is one of the most genuinely menacing things in the film. The constraint made it stranger than I would have made it alone.

The Pipeline

There was no single AI tool that could make this film. The work was matching each tool to the specific emotional job it was best at, and building a production line that could run inside a weekend.

Human in the Loop

These animations were expensive: long, heavy renders where a single sequence could run hundreds of frames. You cannot brute-force that in 48 hours. I started the Deforum pieces Friday night, the most processor-intensive work in the whole film, and let them cook overnight. They were well worth the wait. The craft was in the direction of the machine: choosing the right first frame, testing a handful of frames to read the motion and the mood, and only then greenlighting a full run. Every generation was art-directed before it was rendered.

To make the clock work, I ran a small render farm of one: my self-built desktop grinding on one thread, Deforum running in parallel in the cloud, and my MacBook Pro handling the edit. Three machines, one operator, working simultaneously so no hardware ever sat idle. It was as much a logistics problem as a creative one.

I never really fought the tools. I knew going in that all of this would be a little wonky in 2023, so instead of sanding down the artifacts I leaned into them. The flicker, the melting, the surreal drift between frames were not bugs to hide. For a film about a bad trip, that instability was the point. Directing the tools meant knowing which weirdness served the horror and steering toward it, not away.

Sound as Structure

Beyond the score, the sound design does structural work. Every audio choice is there to make the visuals land harder, to tell you how to feel about an image the models rendered without intent. When the picture is unstable, the sound has to be the thing that means something.

What Holds Up

Watching it back, the honest assessment: the Runway-era style transfer has aged the most, and 2023 vid2vid carries the fingerprints of its moment. But the Stable Diffusion animation and the Midjourney infinite zoom still hold, and I think that's the real lesson. They hold not because the models were good by today's standards, but because they were pointed at something: fear. Generative work survives when it's doing emotional work, not when it's showing off the tool.