Three days ago I got a notification. “1 day left to submit your animated film.” I had nothing. No script. No plan. Just… a tiny idea: The fear of losing your job to AI. So I made this. It’s called WHY. A claymation fever dream. A thread about how... it came to life in 14 hours:show more

The Curious Refuge + Promise Animation contest had been on my radar, but I’d totally forgotten. I was swamped with work. Still… something clicked. I remembered that idea—about a programmer panicking while scrolling through “the app”. AI apocalypse meets meme culture.

Friday 5pm. I clock out of work. I’ve got 14 hours before the deadline (March 28th at 11:59pm PT, which was 29th 08:00 am in Spain). No animatic. No storyboard. No pipeline. I always work iteratively—script → animatic → image blocking → animation. This time? I dove headfirst. Scene by scene. No looking back.

I had been experimenting with the new multimodal ChatGPT during the day. It was blowing my mind. The visual reasoning, the design help, the speed... I thought: screw the contest. This will be a test. A collaboration. Me + GPT-4o + a swarm of tools.

I called my friend @ritacodes. She’s a brilliant dev with a unique look. I said: You’re the protagonist. Can I use your face and voice? She said: “Of course.” That changed everything. Rita became Rita—a character we follow into a digital hallucination.

I started building her in ChatGPT: Using profile photos of Rita Generating consistent character turnarounds Designing a world around her: "Y Fairgrounds" — a circus made of AI anxieties The Oracle with green-dot eyes Tarot cards like “THE DOOMER” and “THE ASI DAWN”

My tools? ChatGPT (GPT-4o): Brainstorming, visual generation, composition, consistency Kling: motion ElevenLabs: synthetic voice for the Oracle Midjourney, Photoshop, Freepik, DaVinci Resolve, Audio for music Every shot built with AI as the backbone—not just filters. Intentional. Designed.

By 11pm I had about 40% of the short done. I could’ve stopped. But something was happening—I’d never felt so much control over a film so fast. It felt like magic. No compromises. The full four-page script on screen. I didn’t cut a single beat.

At 5am, I had one thing left: sound. Chaos. No bluetooth on my PC. No wired headphones. I edited the mix by guessing, trying not to wake up the neighbors. Rita’s voice came in over WhatsApp. The Oracle? AI-generated. Everything just… fit.

I submitted the film minutes before the deadline. I was wrecked. But I’d done it. Not just a test—an actual short. Co-directed with a multimodal intelligence. Real storytelling. Handmade textures. AI hallucinations. And a surprising amount of heart.

The result is WHY, one of the most intense creative experiences I’ve had. If you watch it, I hope you feel the tension... and the hope.

Created for @curiousrefuge & @promise_ai’s #AIAnimation contest. Visuals crafted using AI as the central creative tool. Written, designed, and completed in 14 hours. A shortfilm by @hilarioabad With @ritacodes #CuriousRefuge Voting opens April 3. More soon.

Brilliant move: mis-tagged the incredibly well-known @rita_codes. Classic me. 💙

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