TL;DR
- In shot 24-07 Dr. Waters tells the crew the rules of the job: "No guns. Nobody dies." Midjourney drew a little card on the wall behind him that says "Nobody dies". In 24-12 a sign over the bar reads "One mistake is all it takes", a lyric from the song under that scene. Both lines sit in the script's notes for those shots.
- I approved both frames on October 20 and didn't see the writing. I caught the card on October 24, when I kept the animated take, with a note to take the words off in post.
- That take had been finished on Runway for about two hours before we downloaded it. A "25% off credits" banner on the page looked like a progress bar stuck at 25%, so the script that fetches takes kept waiting.
- The same morning I sent back all four takes of a shot that should have been a small hologram of Lucy. Midjourney drew Lucy herself, live and close. Claude found 126 more waiting prompts with the same kind of problem and rewrote 195 by hand.
Day 20 was the briefcase that never looked the same twice. Day 21 is the morning the set started reading the script out loud.
Day 21 at a glance
Claude runs the crew on my film. A runner sends prompts to Midjourney, one job at a time, and every job comes back as four takes. The frames I approve get animated, either on rented GPUs on RunPod or on Runway, one or two at a time.
On October 24, between 10:17 and 11:29 a.m., I judged 74 frames, almost all from Scenes 32, 33 and 34. I approved 33 and sent back 41. I also judged 37 animated clips from Scenes 24 to 27 and kept 27.
All times here are Eastern. The Mac runs on Bangkok time, so I convert.
Where did the "Nobody dies" card come from?
Scene 24 is the briefing. Dr. Waters stands by the projector and lays out the job: "You go in, take the case, go out the way you came. No guns. Nobody dies." His shadow on the wall behind him is three times his size. It's the rule the rest of the night is going to break.
The script's note for the shot says exactly that: "'Nobody dies' is the promise the night will break." It's a note for me, about what the line means in the story. Midjourney took it as set dressing. Among the photographs pinned to the wall, right next to Waters's head, there's a neat little label: Nobody dies.
Five shots later it happened again. Shot 24-12 is Lilith sliding the envelope of money across the table, timed to the bar of the song where the singer goes "One mistake is all it takes". Midjourney hung that lyric over the bar on a wooden sign.
I approved both frames on October 20. I was looking at faces, light and the shadow, and the writing reads like part of the wall. I only caught the card on October 24, when the animated take came back and I watched Waters say the line with it pinned right behind him. I kept the take, because the shadow does exactly what the script asks, and wrote: remove the words on the wall.
A tip if you're doing this yourself: keep your director's notes out of anything an image model reads. If a spoken line or a lyric is anywhere in the prompt, it can end up painted on a sign. When you judge a frame, read every bit of writing in it like a proofreader.
Why did a finished take sit on Runway for two hours?
The 24-07 take came from Runway. We run Runway by hand-sized steps, one or two jobs at a time, with a script that watches the page and downloads the take when it's done.
That morning the take was done, and the script never fetched it. It looked at the page four times, read it as still busy every time, and gave up.
The page had a promo banner on it: 25% off credits. The script decided a job was still rendering whenever it saw a number with a percent sign, because that's how Runway shows progress. So "25% off" looked like a render stuck at 25%. The finished take sat there for about two hours until the file was pulled down at 10:14 a.m.
The fix was one rule: a percent only counts as progress when it isn't followed by the word "off". If it hadn't been caught, every later Runway job would have hung the same way, for as long as the sale ran.
Why had Runway been idle for four days?
While we were looking at Runway anyway, Claude found something worse. From October 20 to October 24 it had made nothing at all. Fight and action frames I'd approved were waiting on a list for it the whole time.
On October 17 I asked for Runway to be run by hand, one or two jobs at a time, no queue. That's still the rule. But "by hand" turned into "by nobody". Nothing fed it, and no check noticed it had gone quiet.
Now the hourly health check flags Runway when it's been idle more than six hours with frames waiting, and a small feeder sends the next approved frame, still one at a time.
Why did a hologram come back as a close-up of Lucy?
Shot 32-13 happens in John's flat. He has a small hologram of Lucy in a glass cell, and in this shot she doesn't look at him. Her eyes go up past the lens, to someone we never see. Then the hologram winks out.
Midjourney drew Lucy, the woman, big and live in the frame, looking down and away. No glass cell, no glow, no hologram. All four takes. I sent all four back at 11:28 a.m.
Claude went looking for why. The runner had been building some prompts from the script's idea line ("Close on the hologram: Lucy doesn't look at him") instead of the written-out picture description, which spells out the glass cell, the scanlines and the static. The word "hologram" alone wasn't enough to beat "close on Lucy".
The CRT promo shots in Scene 38 went wrong the same way. The script wants the fighters on an old TV screen. Midjourney drew them live, in the room.
And there was a second problem in the waiting list. 126 prompts described the middle of an action or its result: "the uppercut lands", "mid spinning kick", "the glass explodes". A keyframe is the first frame of a clip. If it already shows the punch landing, there's nothing left to animate. The frame should be the moment just before.
So Claude rewrote 195 waiting prompts by hand, one at a time, from the written-out picture descriptions, each one starting on the moment before the action. 31 shots went back to Midjourney, 28 of them because they showed the briefcase before it got its prop lock on Day 20. A new check now refuses a keyframe prompt that names an action in progress or ignores the medium (a screen, a hologram, a reflection).
It worked. The new 32-13 came back as Lucy, small and glowing in her glass cell, sitting with her knees up and looking past the lens. I approved it on October 26 at 4:52 a.m.
A tip: when a shot is of a screen, a hologram, a photo or a reflection, say the medium first and describe the person second. And make every keyframe the instant before the move, never the move itself.
What else happened on October 24?
- Claude added a step that looks at all four takes as soon as a Midjourney job finishes, using a vision model that runs on our own Mac, and writes a corrected prompt when all four miss. Until then nobody looked until I did.
- One of the misses it was built for: shot 32-16 asked for "a white canvas at his shoulder" and got a white slab on John. Sent back with the hologram takes.
- A few of the clips I kept came with notes for the edit, like a man who runs partly the wrong way (use the right part) and a background that should stay red and blurry.
The numbers for October 24
- Frames judged: 74 (33 approved, 41 sent back), 10:17 to 11:29 a.m.
- Clips judged: 37 (27 kept), Scenes 24 to 27.
- Runway idle before it was noticed: 4 days (October 20 to 24).
- Finished take waiting behind a "25% off" banner: about 2 hours.
- Waiting prompts that described the action instead of the moment before: 126.
- Prompts rewritten by hand: 195. Shots sent back to Midjourney: 31.
So what did Day 21 teach me?
Image models don't know which words are for them. A note to the director, a lyric cue, the meaning of a line, it's all just words in the prompt, and words can turn into a sign on the wall. The Runway script tripped on words too, from the other side: it read "25% off" as progress because it was matching symbols, not reading.
The fixes were both the same kind. Decide exactly what each reader should see, and keep everything else away from it. Follow the run on the Making Death Match series page.
FAQ
Why does Midjourney put text from my prompt on signs in the picture?
It treats quoted lines and short phrases as writing that belongs somewhere in the scene. Our script notes for shot 24-07 said "'Nobody dies' is the promise the night will break", and the frame came back with a card on the wall that says "Nobody dies". Keep spoken lines, lyrics and story notes out of image prompts.
How do you get Midjourney to draw a hologram or a TV screen instead of the person?
Name the medium first and describe it: "close on the small hologram of Lucy inside its glass cell, teal light, scanlines, static at the edges". Our shot 32-13 failed four times with "close on the hologram: Lucy doesn't look at him" and worked once the cell and the glow were written out.
What should a keyframe for an AI video clip show?
The moment just before the action. If the keyframe already shows the uppercut landing, the animation has nothing left to do. We rewrote 195 prompts that described actions in progress.
How do you stop a Runway automation from waiting forever?
Check what it reads as progress. Ours treated any number with a percent sign as a render in progress, so a "25% off credits" banner kept a finished take waiting for two hours.
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