Bo Knows
An AI short film about the greatest two-sport athlete who ever lived. No crew. No cameras. No location. Twenty years of production discipline, aimed through a new machine. The honest version of how it got made is not “I typed a prompt.” It is the same discipline as any production: boards first, a locked design language, and a consistency system enforced shot by shot.
The Film Is the Resume. The Pipeline Is the Argument.
Twenty years executive producing for Nike, Jordan, the NFL, and Spotify meant productions with trucks, crews, casting directors, and catering budgets. This piece was produced by one person at a desk.
Generative models will happily redesign your main character between takes if nobody is watching. The job was making sure somebody was always watching.
Four Stages. One Design Language.
Boards first: six chapters locked before a single frame generated, VO written and cut to time. Plates: hundreds of Midjourney generations curated to hero frames, rejects outnumbering keepers ten to one. Motion: plates animated in Kling with tightly constrained prompts, every clip carrying a must-not-change list: face, palette, light direction, silhouette. Finish: conform, titles, captions, sound design, and grade in After Effects, the stage where clips become a film.
Two Hundred Generations That Read as One Film
The style is the consistency system: faceless low-poly geometry, a restricted 1988 palette, chunky distressed type with partial-letter cropping. Constraints are what make volume generation direct-able. Every frame either belongs to this world or gets cut.
What the Tools Replaced. What They Didn’t.
Replaced: the location, the truck, the schedule, the camera department, the six-figure budget, the wait between idea and image.
Not replaced: taste, knowing when a frame is wrong. Story structure and the edit. Direction: constraints, consistency, intent. The ten thousand hours that trained the eye. That second list is the job. It has always been the job.
The full production breakdown, including the bid-sheet math, lives in Field Notes.