Day 17: How many clips does $2.49 of rented GPU time buy an AI film crew? Forty, a sign that blinked in unison and a Lucy from the wrong studio

Day 16 was about engines that stopped. Day 17 was about what they made once they were running on their own again.

Day 17 at a glance

Claude runs the crew on my film. A runner sends prompts to Midjourney, one at a time. A render queue sends the frames I approve to rented GPUs to be animated. The edit room re-cuts one scene every hour or two. Four critics score each cut. Claude's pre-judge looks at every new frame before I do.

On October 19 the engines had been down for 13 and a half hours. They came back at 8:08 p.m. and now run in their own session. At 11:39 p.m. I approved 41 frames. October 20 starts an hour later. All times here are Eastern.

How did one rented GPU make 40 clips before dawn?

The render queue found 32 approved frames waiting. It rented one A100 on RunPod at 12:48 a.m. The last clip, John in Scene 22, came back at 2:04 a.m. Then the pod was deleted. That was 1.27 hours for about $1.77.

Two smaller pods followed. One made a single clip, Mike alone in the Dream Lab with dry eyes, for about $0.21. The other made seven clips by 2:40 a.m., for about $0.51. Total: 40 clips for about $2.49.

Nineteen of the 40 were Scene 22. Lucy follows John to the Paradise, hides from the Enforcers and races to beat him home. Then they argue in their flat.

At 10:25 a.m. I sat down with them. By 10:45 I had approved 38. Two of those use only part of the take. Three more came with notes. In 22-07, John has facial hair he's not supposed to have. In 22-14 his hair changed. In 22-16 he just looks wrong. Those three wait for a fix before the cut uses them. I rejected two. Scene 52-12 for its animation. And Scene 22-01, which needs its own section.

Why did the broken sign blink in perfect time?

Scene 06 opens on one shot. The Paradise bar's pink sign lies upside down in a curb puddle. Mike waits in the bar window. John stands at the far curb in the rain. The script says two letters are dead, so the sign reads PARA DISE. Paradise split in two.

The clip I got had all eight letters lit. Every half second or so they dimmed together and came back together. A broken sign with rhythm.

At 12:22 a.m. I approved it with a note: a couple of letters should blink at different times, like a broken sign, not all in unison.

At 12:47 a.m. Claude had a fixed copy. It found each letter and gave it its own glow, borrowed from other frames of the same take:

• P and the first A stay lit, with odd dropouts.
• R and the second A sputter, each on its own random rhythm.
• I and E blink slowly, out of step with each other.
• D and S are dead tubes, with a rare fizz.

Nothing else in the frame changed. The edit room's 6:29 p.m. run then caught one more thing. The scene ends on the same sign, with P and A dark. The opening and the ending don't match. That ending needs relighting, then my approval again.

How did Lucy end up in a Miyazaki film?

Shot 22-01 is Lucy at the curb in the rain, outside the Paradise, under a broken umbrella. Lucy is a grown woman. She followed John there, and she hates that she did. I approved the Midjourney frame at 11:39 p.m. on the 19th: Lucy in a yellow raincoat, hood up, the bar sign upside down in a puddle at her feet.

The first pod animated it. In the first two seconds Lucy reaches up and her hood falls back. Under it is a little girl with short, messy hair, the kind you see in a Miyazaki film. Her broken umbrella turned into a torn, jagged leaf. Same rain, same puddle, same sign. A different movie.

At 10:41 a.m. I rejected it. My note said it looked like a copy of a Miyazaki film. Death Match is rated R. The frame is still approved. Only the animation went.

What happened to the slap?

Scene 20 is the Dream Lab gym. Lilith and John spar. In 20-18a her open palm snaps his head back and splits his lip. In the script, she isn't pulling her strikes, and he likes it.

Runway gave me a 15-second take. The first slap lands at half a second. Then the picture freezes with her palm on his cheek, from about 0.7 to 9.8 seconds. The second slap lands at 10.5 seconds. Nine seconds of a hand resting on a face, in a fight scene.

At 12:25 a.m. I approved it with a note: the start and the end are good, so keep the two slaps and cut out the frozen middle.

By 12:56 a.m. Claude had a new copy. It keeps the first slap and the last one, and cuts 7.8 seconds of freeze. The cut falls inside the frozen part, where the frames match, so you can't see the seam. Now it's two slaps about a second apart, and John grins after the second one. Fight shots play a little fast in this film, so the cut runs it at 120 percent.

What did the edit room do in eight runs?

Eight runs started on October 20, one scene each. The numbers are the critics' average out of 10, before and after.

• Scene 08 (12:29 a.m.): 5.63 to 5.83. The spy's line, "You won't... win. There are those... who will stop you," was back. No cut had played it since October 13. The line check said all was well, because the scene's script file listed no shots to check. Now an empty script file sets off an alarm.
• 3:29 and 4:29 a.m.: stood down. Another Claude session was running a cut audit I had asked for. It was pulling takes I had approved early and rejected later, in nine scenes. Two editors on one scene is how cuts get lost, so the edit room kept its hands off.
• Scene 03 (5:29 a.m.): 6.0 to 7.0, the best of the day. A title card printed its words across Lucy's face as one shot faded into the next. The edit room learned to dip to black instead.
• 8:20 a.m.: stood down again. The audit had moved on to Scene 16.
• Scene 02 (9:29 a.m.): 6.67 at its first score. The scene no longer opens on John moving his mouth with no sound. The run stopped at 12:02 p.m., when the audit started a sweep of every scene.
• Scene 06 (6:29 p.m.): 5.63 to 6.5. A four-second card that said MISSING 06-02c is gone. My approved take of the masked painter plays there now.
• Scene 08 (9:29 p.m.): 5.6 to 6.63. Victor's "Ah, yes, the so-called heroes" is back too, also missing since October 13. It starts over the end of the spy's line, two voices overlapping the way Welles liked.

That last run broke one of my rules on the way. To make room for Victor's line, it slowed a shot of the robot's hand to 0.7 times speed. I picked that take, and my picks play at real speed. The critics caught it before anything reached me. The check now looks for every way a clip can be slowed.

What did I judge on October 20?

Two sittings at the review page, and some notes in chat:

• Just after midnight: 22 clips and 15 frames, in six minutes. The sign and the slap were in this batch.
• Before dawn, in chat: I turned down 17 love-scene frames and one clip. Those scenes stay off this diary.
• 10:25 to 10:53 a.m.: 45 clips and 39 frames. I approved 43 of the clips.

Two frame notes stand out. In Scene 23, Elektra should be alone in the rain. The prompt mentioned Mike, so Midjourney gave her a man with an umbrella. In Scene 24, a floor plan should be projected onto John's cheek. I said the prompt was the problem, and it goes back to be rewritten.

What did Midjourney do?

The runner finished 47 jobs, from 12:14 a.m. to 11:52 p.m. Claude's pre-judge checked 183 frames and passed 119. It caught some good ones:

• Scene 23-06: the reference picture of Pettibone came back pasted into the frame as a giant second Pettibone.
• Scene 24-05: the film projector came out as a little toy car with headlights.
• Scene 24-07: Waters says, "No guns. Nobody dies." Midjourney painted "Nobody dies" across three takes as a subtitle, big and yellow on one, misspelled on another. The take I approved at 10:50 a.m. has it too, on a little note pinned to the wall between the photos. In a film called Death Match.
• Scene 24-10: Mike's torso and arms ballooned into a ring around the whole table.
• Scene 25-08, at 10:43 p.m.: every take was a two-by-two grid of four Lucys, with her line written into the picture.

Three jobs failed. Two prompts each carried six reference pictures, and Midjourney refused them without a word. Now the prompt check stops any prompt with more than three.

One more thing. The runner's night pause follows the Mac's clock, and the Mac runs on Bangkok time. So from 2:06 to 9:59 p.m. Eastern, Midjourney rested.

What got posted?

Day 10's three X posts went out at 10:41 a.m., 12:53 p.m. and 10:48 p.m. None of them opened with "pov:". That day I asked for posts that sound like me, a 45-year-old filmmaker, not a teenager. A new voice check now refuses slang and anything we've already said.

The new social factory also started, at 12:31 p.m. Then Facebook's token went live, and the factory scheduled 26 Facebook reels in about three minutes, plus 24 reschedule calls two seconds apart. At 11:01 p.m. Facebook said we were posting too fast. Now there are at least five minutes between any two Facebook calls.

The numbers for October 20

• My verdicts: 68 clips (60 approved, 8 rejected) and 71 frames (34 approved, 37 rejected). Seventeen of the frame rejections were love-scene frames.
• RunPod: 3 pods, 40 clips, about $2.49. I approved 38.
• Runway: 4 takes of 15 seconds, all approved.
• Midjourney runner: 47 jobs done, 3 failed. Pre-judge: 183 checks, 119 passed.
• Edit room: 8 runs. 4 improved their scene, 1 was stopped after its first score, 3 stood down.
• Lines back in Scene 08 after a week: 2.

So what did Day 17 teach me?

The AI likes things tidy. Give it a broken sign and it blinks every letter in time. Give it a slap and it holds the hand still for nine seconds, like a photo. Give it a woman alone in the rain and it draws a sweet kid.

Most of my notes on October 20 asked for something messier. The machines got faster. My notes still have to say what kind of mess. Follow the run on the Making Death Match series page.

FAQ

How much does it cost to animate 40 AI film clips?
On October 20 it cost about $2.49 on RunPod: three A100 pods, the biggest running 1.27 hours for 32 clips. I approved 38 of the 40.

Why did the neon letters all blink together?
In the animation, the whole sign pulsed as one light. My note asked for a broken sign. Claude gave each letter its own glow, taken from frames of the same take, so two letters stay dark and the rest flicker on their own.

What does "it looks like a Miyazaki film" mean for an AI clip?
The animation pass redrew Lucy as a little girl with short, messy hair, in a style much like Miyazaki's. The frame was right. The motion changed who she was, so I rejected the clip and kept the frame.

Why did the AI editor stand down three times?
A cut audit I had asked for was editing the same scenes in another session. The edit room has a rule: one editor per scene. It waits until the audit has been quiet for 45 minutes.

While you wait for the next update: play Halfsies

Halfsies is our iPhone game, live now. One cut. Two halves. Each day you get three objects and one attempt at each: cut it exactly in half by eye and the scale tells you how close you got. No restart needed. Download Halfsies on the App Store