Seal

The only one who remembers. Three blocks shot out of four, and this is exactly where it stands.

Type: In production
Format: 9:16 · 720p
Blocks: 3 de 4
Shot: 59 s montados

The challenge

Hold the same man — face, beard, uniform, hat, boat — across four blocks shot in different sessions on two different engines, in a swamp where everything is the same grey. If Jack Porter stops being the same man between block one and block three, there is no film.

Self-initiated. Termópilas doesn't publish client cases yet, so the brief for both of these came from the studio itself.

The process

01The character is closed in writing
Two canonical face references fix Jack Porter, and from there it isn't reopened. Every new shot is generated against them, never against the previous shot: chaining approximations is how a face gets lost.
02The props are canon too
The dog tags on the boat carried another name, Johnson. They were changed to PORTER, JACK and two versions of the prop went with them. An object that reads on screen is as canonical as a face.
03Continuity decided up front, not in the edit
The boonie hat stays on until the hand-to-hand in block three, where it goes in the water; after that Jack has no hat. The attackers keep their balaclavas on at all times, no patches: the viewer isn't meant to know who they are yet. And there is one boat, always the same one: if it takes hits, the holes are still there in the next block.
04One colour law, and two exceptions
Cold and desaturated, grey hour, mist. The only warm accents in the whole piece are muzzle flashes and red lasers. Ambient sound and radio static, no voices and no music: music comes in at the edit, not in the generation.

Unfinished, on purpose

The other cases on this site show finished work. This one doesn't: it's half-way. It's published like this because what a client needs to know before commissioning anything isn't how it ends up, but how the decisions get made while you're inside it.

The character, locked

The two canonical references for Jack Porter, and the prop that was remade over a name.

The three blocks shot so far

In script order. None of them is cut together with the others yet: they're shown as they came out, without music and without a final grade.

Block 1 — The emergence

Fifteen seconds in a single take. Jack comes out of the water and finds the boat.

Block 2 — The boat bench

The find: dog tags and a casualty report on the bench. An earlier version was dropped because an object teleported between frames.

Block 3 — The ambush

Twenty-nine seconds in one take. They shoot first and he answers; it ends with five lasers on him and his hands up.

What's missing

Block four hasn't been shot. The thirty-second board is on its fourth version: the second was dropped for reading as comic art and the third for errors in the attackers' masks. And there's no master: the three blocks exist separately, uncut.

What has to be said

There's no delivery date and no client behind it: it's a self-initiated project and it moves when there's room. Publishing it half-done is deliberate, but the obvious thing is worth saying — as of today there is no finished piece to show, only the work inside it.

Something similar in mind?

Tell me what you're thinking and I'll tell you whether it can be done, how long it takes and what it would need.

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