Henry Daubrez 🌸💀
@henrydaubrez • 60,286 subscribers
Filmmaking, Creative Technology, and ADHD. Founder at @thisisoddkid In Progress... "Junkyard King and The Light Within"
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AI video doesn’t need another infinite slop machine. It needs a showrunner. Using MiniMax H3 Max, thanks fal, I built "THIS WAY", a live film engine that remembers characters, arcs and consequences. The audience votes live. Two futures generate ahead. The winner becomes canon and the story keeps unfolding. It’s not perfect yet, but this feels like an important step: not infinite generation, but AI serving an actual plot through audience decisions.
Henry Daubrez 🌸💀95,897 Aufrufe • vor 6 Tagen
KITSUNE 🦊 💫 When I embarked on this project a month ago, I didn’t expect it to consume holidays, evenings, and far too many nights—but here we are. From the first scenes, I knew I had something special, and I don’t want audiences to watch an “AI film”—I just want them to watch a film, and hopefully, a good one at that. ( Sound On 🔈) 👇 KITSUNE is a tale of love between two souls separated by everything except their shared feelings of loneliness. I grew up in front of beautiful cartoons, from timeless treasures like those of Don Bluth, which I watched again and again to the point of damaging my VHS tapes, to early 90s anime, and later, of course, plenty of Studio Ghibli. And yes, before you ask—I know Hayao Miyazaki would disapprove of this film 100%, but then again… I’m not (only?) seeking approval. I’ve had goosebumps many times while reviewing the evolving states of this film, and I hope at least some of you will feel the same. Another famous director (Guillermo del Toro , I see you) recently said AI could create “semi-compelling screensavers,” and I see this as a step toward proving him wrong. Because you’ll ask: under the hood, there’s been tons of writing, re-writing, and switching directions mid-way. All shots were generated with Google’s text-to-video hashtag#VEO2. I faced countless challenges and hoops to bring my vision to life, finding ways to prompt and structure within the limitations of text-to-video despite VEO’s excellent prompt adherence. So, is VEO magic? No, not really—and the 1,700+ curated sequences on my hard drive (out of an estimated 5,000–7,000 total generations) are proof of that. What impressed me most was the global consistency, adherence, and how I could achieve tweaks by simply adjusting a few words. But what mattered most to me was creating something warm, nostalgic, and full of heart, avoiding the cold, clinical feel of so many films leveraging AI. Also, I’m a 40-year-old kid who grew up in front of the TV, has been creative his entire life, and has been designing professionally for nearly two decades. The more time passes, the more I know I can relate to what Nick Rubin said in that now-famous interview, where he mentions having no technical knowledge but trusting and building his own taste. If you like this film, this isn't just "Oh, AI is magic." You need to steer the damn ship. Then there’s MMAudio for sound effects, regular good old stock sound libraries, music on Udio for this version (yes, there’s a second version—more on that later), and tons and tons (and tons!) of editing, sound design, and small post-processing touches. Is this exposing risks for animators? Perhaps. Or it could also be their greatest companion, because once again, this is the worst it will ever be, yada yada yada.... No, it isn’t perfect, and if you look close enough, you’ll find defects and variations, but this is a film I’m proud of, not just an AI one... Enjoy. Wanna see a clean uncompressed version?
Henry Daubrez 🌸💀1,001,207 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
Well… this got real. A-list producer conversations around the feature film adaptation of The Light Within continue this week as I keep building the world visually and assembling the pieces needed to bring it to life. The goal hasn’t changed: 🎬 Feature film ⚙️ Hybrid production pipeline (and traditional CGI) 🎭 Theatrical release ✨ 2027
Henry Daubrez 🌸💀111,953 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
THE LIGHT WITHIN A concept trailer powered by Nano Banana Pro 🍌 I haven’t been impressed by new AI tools lately but this one swept me off my feet. The kicker? I used Google Flow and a few wild tricks to get perfect consistency. Here's a step-by-step full breakdown 🧵 #1/15
Henry Daubrez 🌸💀149,068 Aufrufe • vor 9 Monaten
Five months after wrapping it, OVERGROWN 🌱 is finally out. My longest film to date. A 13-minute allegorical drama about living with cancer and chronic illness. Six months of work. 300+ shots. Every shot started as an image before becoming video. I’d probably make it differently today but AI moves fast. Stories stay. Full film in the first reply. 👇
Henry Daubrez 🌸💀31,478 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
I rewatched Home Alone with my son today and it was funny to notice how many inconsistencies, raccord issues, and tiny broken details are in a film considered a gem of the 90s. We never cared. We were in the story, so our brains let the imperfections slide. What struck me is how different the standard feels when using AI. I obsess over every tiny continuity mistake, every aesthetic shift, every micro detail, because I know any small flaw will immediately be used by the anti-AI crowd to discredit the whole thing. Putting both side by side, it is insane. Traditional filmmaking is full of human errors and nobody cares because the story carries it. Meanwhile, I am pushing for an even higher level of technical perfection simply to avoid giving people ammunition to dismiss the work. And here is the spoiler. Even if the story was flawless, even if the rhythm was right, even if the continuity was perfect, the conclusion would still be “it is stolen content” or “I don’t like AI.” At the end of the day, the story is what matters. The rest is noise.
Henry Daubrez 🌸💀131,702 Aufrufe • vor 9 Monaten
WHITE RABBIT A glimpse into a new world 1-minute screentest. How this came together 👇
Henry Daubrez 🌸💀45,937 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
Junkyard King - Ep. 0 | MAKING OF ⚙️ HERE’S HOW I MADE THIS, STEP BY STEP 🧵👇 1/14
Henry Daubrez 🌸💀41,745 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
ODD KID • SHOWREEL 2026 🔊 A quick showreel of what I’ve been building over the last twelve months with Odd Kid The first building blocks of larger worlds like The Light Within and Junkyard King but also some bits and pieces of Electric Pink, Kidd-0, Kitsune, etc. They all have one thing in common: a fascination for storytelling and a belief that new tools should expand our imagination, not replace it. After fifteen years of building studios and creative companies, it felt like the right time to start something of my own again. Odd Kid is an original IP label and micro-studio focused on developing new worlds, packaging original stories, and collaborating with exceptional artists, filmmakers, and technologists to bring them to life. This is just the beginning. More soon. ⚔️✨
Henry Daubrez 🌸💀20,709 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
KILL YOUR DARLINGS One of the hardest skills to develop as a storyteller is learning to kill your darlings. Whether it’s a character, a design, a shot, or even an entire sequence, the fact that something works doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best version of itself. I often see people using AI and falling in love with the first or second iteration because it’s already impressive. The tools have become so good that they make it incredibly tempting to stop there. I try to do the opposite. The Light Within has already gone through countless visual iterations, and I’m sure it will go through many more before it’s finished. Every new pass is an opportunity to ask a simple question: Is this really the version I want to spend years of my life bringing into the world? Sometimes the answer is yes. Quite often, it’s no. This is one of those earlier screen tests. Looking back at it reminds me how much the project has evolved, and why falling in love with the process is far more valuable than falling in love with the first idea. PS: also never say never.. as I rewatch this iteration there js a lot I still very much like.
Henry Daubrez 🌸💀14,570 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
So, Google said, "Hey, wanna make a film for #GoogleIO ? You have Carte Blanche." 🤯 For a brain that’s been mainlining animation and questionable VHS tapes since forever, that kind of freedom is both a dream and a mild panic attack. To be honest, until recently I never really thought film making was in the cards for me. Life happened, and although I ended up being a designer, film was more of a distant dream of a young version of myself. Following the unexpected attention and warm reception for Kitsune earlier this year, Electric Pink came out as my own self-administered therapy session: a coming-of-age story that’s basically me trying to figure out my own creative wiring, from the fuzzy nostalgia of childhood to the full-on HD chaos of the present. Turns out, the path to making stuff is paved with a lot of self-doubt and sudden left turns. I’m hoping this film can build on the connection Kitsune fostered. For this project, focused on exclusively using a lengthy process involving leveraging Imagen 3 to create the base of still frames (Imagen was amazing at iteratively enabling me to lock art direction) which I would then heavily retouch and prepare to get them as perfect as needed. Then each scene would be run through VEO2 to get animated clips based on those images (and then a very obvious bunch of sound design, voice design, editing, post-production and what not). Now, what's been amazing as I was nearing the end of this project, is to see individual separate tools converge towards becoming "Flow": Google's AI filmmaking tool built on DeepMind's brilliant tools (Veo, Imagen, Gemini). I must say it’s been fascinating seeing how this tech can translate the random noise in my head into something… well, film-like. It felt like a real step forward in allowing creators to iterate and refine their vision without getting bogged down in organization, and for example having an opportunity to use a first-frame to last-frame interpolation proved to be extremely useful as I could fully control the action I was aiming for. Now in its current version, Flow offers even more features such as the scene builder to easily expand storylines, or ingredients to control character, object, and environment consistency...can't wait to dig more into those possibilities...they definitely would have made my life easier during the creation of this film which I hope you will enjoy. Read more here: And there:
Henry Daubrez 🌸💀51,420 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
⚡️🌸 JUNKYARD KING Episode 0 ⚔️ Studio quality is getting closer than people think...
Henry Daubrez 🌸💀19,942 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
