So, I made this film, "Sprawl"...
Here’s a quick rundown of how this thing came together, and it's been a long time coming.
What Got Me Started
This project is personal. "Sprawl" is actually the opening sequence to a full-on feature-length script I wrote back in the early 2000s while I was living in Hollywood.
I've had this story in my head for over 20 years, and the inspiration for this short was the "ureka" moment that I finally had the tools to actually make it. The original script was my love letter to all the classics—Blade Runner, Neuromancer, all that.
The whole film is built around that Philip K. Dick quote in the opening. It sets up the whole theme of the feature: making the audience guess what’s real... the crazy action movie, the weird cyber-world, or the guy in the gutter?
How I Bolted It Together
This thing was an absolute monster to build, held together by a bunch of different AI tools.
- The (Old) Idea: The script was already written. The whole point is to make you follow one guy, the infiltrator "Tatsu," only to reveal he's just the prologue.
- The Look: To get Veo 3 to match the vision I've had in my head for 20 years, I had to first go into Canva and make a ton of "start frame" reference images. Actually, the 'nano banana' release happened right in the middle of production, which really helped me generate better reference images. It was a huge boost for locking in that visual consistency before I even got to the video generation step.
- The Tools: I fed those reference images to Veo 3 to generate the hundreds of clips.
- The Sound: Veo 3 actually handled most of the on-screen dialogue right in the video, which was wild. I used ElevenLabs to do the main voice-overs (like Tatsu's hacker, 'Rez', and the Warden) and then just messed with all the audio, adding static and distortion to make it sound corrupted.
- The Real Work: Honestly, the film was made in CapCut Pro. That's where I glued everything together. All the glitching, the static, the cuts between Tatsu's action and the countdown timer on Damon's wrist—that was all done to build tension and tell the story.
What I Learned
My biggest lightbulb moment: AI is perfect for cyberpunk. All the weird "glitchiness" and "uncanny valley" stuff that people usually complain about? I just used it. It's not a bug, it's a feature!
But the real takeaway for me was that this tech let me finally create a project that's been on the shelf for two decades. A script that would have cost a fortune to produce, I could suddenly make, by myself. That's a total game-changer.
The Hard Parts
This was not easy.
- Consistency: Just getting Veo 3 to create the characters as I'd written them was a total nightmare. The release of 'nano banana' mid-project was a lifesaver, as it helped me generate better reference images in Canva, but it was still a brutal grind. Tatsu, the main guy with all his tattoos? I must have re-rolled those shots a hundred times.
- The Glitches: Making the "glitch" effects look intentional, like a story point, and not just like a bad render was tough. I had to time them in CapCut to match the action.
- The Ending: This is the coolest part. It's not a 'twist'—it’s a handoff. The guy we've been following, Tatsu, isn't the main character. He's just the protagonist of the opening sequence. The real "reveal" is the 'villain' who's hunting him—"Damon," the Enforcer with the timer on his wrist. He's the actual protagonist of my full feature script, but in this short, he's just a side character who gets the final shot. The challenge was to make Tatsu's run feel super high-stakes, just to show him get zeroed-out.
Built With
- canva
- capcut
- elevenlabs
- kling
- nanobanana
- veo
- whisk
