W-06Production dossier
A trailer, and everything it asked for. I timed eleven shots on paper before spending a single video credit. I locked the look on nine boards this world already had. A safety filter refused one frame. Eight keyframes came back with a fake seal in the corner, and I cleaned every one. The film is small. Every step of it is on this page.
P-06.1The trailer
Eleven shots carry one arc. An explorer bee leaves the village, crosses the wild and comes home. The animatic sits under the trailer because it came first. It is the same forty-nine seconds in still frames, cut to music and dialogue. The film had to pass that timing test before I spent a single video credit.
Bee Village — Trailer
Watch on Films →
Bee Village — Animatic
P-06.2Method
Two decisions came first, then two problems. I take them in that order.
01
I cut the keyframes to music and dialogue before generating any footage. A joke that does not land in still frames will not be saved by animation. I settled the comic timing on the animatic, and the trailer inherited it whole.
Both cuts carry the same audio mix. Measured on the caption cues, the timings differ by 0.5 seconds at most.
02
I trained no style model. I passed in the nine boards this world already had as weighted references, so the cartoon look belongs to the world rather than to a preset. Every shot then grew from a drawing: ten keyframes and a title plate, generated at final size.
Native output is 1376 × 768 for the ten shot keyframes; the title plate came back at 2880 × 1588. I serve them all without upscale or re-encode.
03
The boards carry the studio seal, and the generator copied it from memory. Eight of the eleven keyframes came back with a fake mark painted into the corner, a red box over illegible strokes, different on every image. The fakes read “Ylowo Dore”, “RAO CRO”, “KO PAZ”. The videos were clean. I erased the strokes by diffusion from their outline, then applied the authentic seal. All thirty-four images of this world now carry the same mark, in the same place.
One fake mark came out orange, not red. The imitation drifts in hue from image to image. I now check the bottom-right corner of every delivered image, on every world.
04
Shot 04 is a held frame, not an animated shot. The safety filter refused it twice, on two different wordings, a false positive on a cartoon bee. On the line “Say no more.” a frozen heroic pose reads as a gag rather than as a compromise. I left the drawing in the cut, and the making-of names it plainly.
Two wordings brought two refusals. The notebook page is titled “One frame stayed a drawing”.
P-06.3Keyframes
Here are six of the eleven drawings the shots grew from, in story order. I serve them at native resolution, without upscale or re-encode.
P-06.4Sound
Three layers sit under the pictures: the sound of each shot, a funky bed, nine spoken lines. Two parts share those nine lines: Pip and the cafe owner. Both are new to this world, and neither name is locked. The making-of is a paper production notebook, filmed.
Bee Village — Making Of
Every voice is captioned, in English and in French, on all three films. Three of the nine lines appear on no page of the notebook: “Good morning, Pip!”, “No bee has ever come this far!”, “There it is!”. They lived only in the mix, and I transcribed them back out of it for the caption tracks.
P-06.5The numbers
| Running time | 00:49 |
|---|---|
| Shots | 11 |
| Spoken lines | 9, two parts |
| Audio layers | 3 |
| Keyframes | 11 — ten at 1376 × 768, title plate at 2880 × 1588 |
| Boards passed as references | 9, weighted |
| Style models trained | 0 |
| Held frames | 1, shot 04 |
| Keyframes cleaned of a fake seal | 8 of 11 |
| Delivery audio | 48 kHz stereo |
| Format | 1280 × 720 16:9 |
Forty-nine seconds cost two refusals, one held frame and eight cleaned seals. All of it is written down above.