Priority Seat

I cast a generated film the way I'd cast a real one. I go through faces until one is right for the part, then I lock a character sheet with the front, three-quarter, profile and close-up before any scene exists. Every shot after that is made with the sheet in front of it, which is how the same person turns up in all of them.

Each character also gets tested in every state the story puts them in. Cai spends the film in the rain, under a hood and asleep on a bus, so he was cast dry, soaked, hood up, hood down and with his eyes shut. Hoxley is seen as an old man and as the commando he was in 1944.

Anything that gets a close-up is made on its own first. The medals and the beret were each built as a single object on a plain background and then dressed onto Hoxley, so they hold up when the camera gets close and they don't change from one shot to the next.

The medals went through versions as well. One bar had six medals. The one in the film has five and leads with the Victoria Cross.

The locations are built empty before anyone's in them. The shelter was made on its own first and then set into the street, so the set is settled before the cast arrives.

The first versions of the stop looked out over open countryside, and I binned them for a terraced street. It's set in the South Wales Valleys, so it had to look right to anyone who's waited for a bus there.

The bus was built as a vehicle before it was ever in a scene. It exists from the front, the side and the back, and from two angles inside, so the bus that pulls in is the one Cai falls asleep on.

The landing craft had to be right, so I checked it against a 1944 photograph of a real British LCA. The plane is on screen for a few seconds as it passes over the beach.

Each shot gets a panel before I make a frame of it, with the action and the camera written underneath. These are shots eight to ten, where the bus pulls in and Cai shoves past Hoxley to get on first.

The first pass was three flat wides. By the sixth, the camera was low at the kerb for the bus, over Hoxley's shoulder as Cai cuts in, and low at the doors looking up at him as he steps on. I'd marked that last one as the hero angle. Six passes took about two hours.

I wanted Cai to go into the dream through water. His eyes close on the bus, the picture goes black, he goes under, and he comes up inside a landing craft with the ramp ahead of him and a rifle in his hands.

The dream starts in first person, looking down at his own hands.

Most of what I make for a film never gets seen. Priority Seat took 731 images and 163 video generations to put 3 minutes 46 on screen, and most of the work is deciding what doesn't go in.

Here's the opening wide twice. The first one was cut, and the second opens the film.

The music the film leans on is one song, Take My Coat. I wrote the lyrics first, then created the track in Suno. The title is the last thing that happens in the film.

The finish is where it stops looking generated. I upscaled in Magnific, fixed what needed fixing in Gemini, then cut and graded the film in Premiere Pro. A shot that still looks generated after that doesn't go in.