TL;DR
- On October 21 the render queue tried to start a batch 95 times. A safety check refused every one, so no GPU was rented and no clip was made. It cost $0, and a day.
- The check exists to keep fight scenes fast. It refuses any action shot whose prompt also says "softly" or "slowly". Two prompts tripped it. One had "a slash of orange light" across Elektra's eyes. The other had a projector "throwing" its beam down a table.
- The edit room tried a dissolve from one take of John into another. For a moment the second John's whole head sat inside the first John's nose. A critic caught it and the dissolve came out.
- I approved 36 of 46 frames in 11 minutes. Claude later held three of them for fixes, including a padlock seal that says MEGAPLEX in wax.
- Claude's pre-judge threw out 103 of 232 new frames, including four takes where a gang member called a Viper became a toy Dodge Viper.
Day 17 was about how much one rented GPU can make in an hour. Day 18 was about the day it never got the chance.
Day 18 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 on RunPod to be animated. Before each batch, a preflight check reads every prompt. The edit room re-cuts one scene every hour or two, and critics score each cut. Claude's pre-judge looks at every new frame before I do.
All times here are Eastern. The Mac runs on Bangkok time, so I convert.
How did two words stop the render queue?
On October 17 some fight clips came back slow and soft. Part of the reason was in Claude's own prompts. It had used calming words to stop the picture from drifting. So we added a rule to the preflight check: if a prompt describes action and also uses a calming word like "softly" or "slowly", the whole batch is refused. Write fights fast, beat by beat.
On October 20 I approved two frames. One is Elektra in close-up with a hard slash of orange light across her eyes. The other is Dr. Waters at the end of a briefing table, his hand on a slide projector. Neither one is a fight.
Claude wrote a description of each frame for the animation prompt. Elektra "speaks softly" and the camera "pushes in very slowly." The projector beam is "throwing a cone of light," and the camera "pushes slowly." The check saw "slash" and "throwing" as action, then saw "softly" and "slowly," and refused.
It refused every batch, not just those two shots. Each batch carried up to 16 approved frames. The queue retried every few minutes with the same prompts. On October 21 that happened 95 times. It started at 6:53 p.m. on the 20th and ended at 7:08 a.m. on the 23rd: 334 refusals in all.
The check did its job. It kept the money in my pocket, $0 spent. What it didn't do was tell anyone. The health check only said "no new clip for 4.6 hours." One edit room run saw that a new batch had started and wrote that the queue was working on it. That batch was refused too.
On the 23rd the edit room found the cause. It rewrote the two descriptions, and seven more like them. The first pod started at 7:16 a.m. I approved both clips at 11:24 and 11:25 a.m. that day. The health check now names any description that would trip the preflight.
How did John end up inside his own nose?
Scene 04 opens on John jogging down the stairwell of his building, then cuts to him on the packed train to work. Both takes are ones I approved. They were made on different days, from different frames, so they're two slightly different drawings of John.
On its 4:30 p.m. run, the edit room tried a dissolve between them instead of a hard cut. In the first take John's face fills the frame on its last half second: his nose, mouth and brow. The second take has him smaller, chest up, among the workers.
Halfway through the dissolve, at 4.79 seconds, the small John's whole head sits inside the big John's nose. The big John's eyes are above it. His mouth runs across the small John's chest.
The round-two critic caught it, frame by frame. I had already ruled out a dissolve like that between two other takes of John. Two designs of the same face morph into each other. The edit room went back to a hard cut, with the train sound starting half a second early to carry you over it.
Scene 04 went from 5.83 to 6.17. The rest of that run moved lines onto the faces that say them, and gave Dot's toy drone its hum as it whips past John's ear.
What did I judge on October 21?
One sitting, from 11:11 to 11:22 a.m.: 46 frames for Scenes 21 and 24 to 27, most of them the Kyoto hotel job. I approved 36 and rejected 10. Three of the rejections were love-scene frames, which stay off this diary. Late that night I also approved six clips from the love scenes and the fighters' party, made on the Mac's own GPU.
Before an approved frame is animated, Claude writes a plain description of what's in it. That afternoon it described 34 new ones, and it held three of them for a fix:
- 27-13: John holds up the case's padlock. The script wants the Megaplex mark on the seal, a circle crossed by three lines, and no lettering. Midjourney pressed "Megaplex" into the wax instead. The idea of the shot is that John never learns what he stole. The seal tells him who it belongs to.
- 26-02: Lilith reads her target off a screen, and the screen says "Crane" in readable type. The script does want his name there, but text gets added in the edit, where it stays sharp. Text painted into a frame turns to soup when it's animated.
- 26-30: the man in the elevator with Lilith is supposed to be Alexander Crane. Midjourney drew someone else.
Each one gets repainted, then comes back to me.
What did Midjourney get wrong?
The runner finished 59 jobs, from 12:07 a.m. to 11:58 p.m., with its usual night pause from 2:06 to 9:59 p.m. Claude's pre-judge checked 232 frames for Scenes 25 to 28 and passed 129. The 103 it failed never reached me. Some of them:
- 27-22: a gang called the Vipers attacks John in the hotel suite. The shot is a Viper slammed down onto a table, gems spilling. All four takes had a shiny toy Dodge Viper sports car parked on the table, with John standing next to it.
- 26-30d: John chokes a Viper. Every take drew the Viper in John's own green jacket, with John's face. The pre-judge's note: it reads as a cheek-to-cheek embrace, not a choke.
- 27-20b: John drives a Viper's face into the vault door. Three of the four takes came back with their lips pressed together.
- 26-05 and 26-05b: the song's lyrics printed across the picture like subtitles, "A double life I can't show" and "One mistake is all it takes." Eight takes in a row.
- 26-14a: tears in John's eyes, in all four takes. Men in this film don't cry.
Many of the rest were John with black hair. His lock says light sandy buzz cut.
What did the edit room do in ten runs?
Ten runs started on October 21. Six stood down because the run before was still going. The other four each took one scene. The numbers are the critics' average out of 10, before and after.
- Scene 07 (4:29 a.m.): 4.75 to 5.63. A ten-second placeholder card sat in the middle of an argument between John and Lucy. Longer pieces of two approved takes now cover most of it, and the card is down to 2.2 seconds.
- Scene 07 again (8:30 a.m. to 4:06 p.m.): 5.63 to 6.69, the best of the day. A line of Lucy's was playing over her own grin, so it now finishes over a short fade to black. Then a new lip sync check refused the render with three failures, and the run fixed all three.
- Scene 04 (4:30 p.m.): 5.83 to 6.17. The nose.
- Scene 10 (7:29 p.m.): 5.5 to 5.75. A take I approved on my phone on October 12, Slade's mouth working with no voice, had been pulled by a new lip sync check. My approved takes stay in the cut, so the edit room put it back and gave the mouth a voice. It first put the shot before Slade's big reveal, which spoiled it. A critic caught that too.
The numbers for October 21
- My verdicts: 46 frames (36 approved, 10 rejected) and 6 clips (all approved, from the love scenes and the fighters' party).
- Render queue: 95 batches refused at preflight, 0 pods, 0 clips, $0. 334 refusals in all, October 20 to 23.
- Midjourney runner: 59 jobs. Pre-judge: 232 checks, 129 passed.
- Approved frames held by Claude for a fix: 3.
- Edit room: 10 runs. 4 improved their scene, 6 stood down.
- Johns inside other Johns: 1.
So what did Day 18 teach me?
A rule that only says no is half a rule. The preflight was right not to send those prompts to a GPU. It was wrong to stay quiet about it for two and a half days while everything looked fine.
The words were the same lesson from the other side. "Slash" and "throwing" were about light. A check that reads words without the sentence will find fights everywhere. Follow the run on the Making Death Match series page.
FAQ
Why did the render queue rent no GPU on October 21?
A preflight check refuses any batch where an action shot's prompt also uses a calming word. Two prompts said "softly" and "slowly", and words about light, "slash" and "throwing", made them look like action. Every batch was refused, 95 times that day. Nothing was spent.
Why not dissolve between two takes of the same character?
In AI animation, two takes are two drawings. In a dissolve they overlap, and on October 21 one John's head showed up inside the other John's nose. A hard cut hides the difference between them.
Why hold a frame the director already approved?
I approve for style and story. Claude checks details before animation: readable text, which turns to mush in motion, and whether each character matches their lock. Three of 36 frames went back for a repaint.
What is Claude's pre-judge?
It looks at every new Midjourney frame before I do and throws out the clear failures. On October 21 it failed 103 of 232, including four toy cars.
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