justrob on BudgetPixel

SHÉ — directed by Rob, produced by Claude driving the BudgetPixel API. A ~57-second anime-styled interpretation of the opening (first two script pages) of Renee Zhan’s BBC short film SHÉ (蛇, “snake”), about Fei, a gifted and isolated British-Chinese teenage violinist. How it was made: 1. Design — generated Fei as a Pastoral-Melancholy character reference (seedream-5.0-pro), the consistency anchor for every shot. 2. Stills — nine hand-painted key frames (seedream-5.0-pro, Fei's reference passed back in). First pass drifted photorealistic; corrected to flat storybook-anime. 3. Motion — each still animated to a clip (seedance-2.0-mini image-to-video, 720p 16:9). 4. Score — a lyria-3 solo-violin instrumental. 5. Cut — assembled in ffmpeg: a Didot 'SHÉ / 蛇' title card, the nine shots bridged by 0.6s crossfades, and burned-in subtitles (scene slugs + Grimsby’s lines), rendered with Pillow because this ffmpeg build lacks drawtext. Solo violin muxed underneath with fades. Creative calls (Rob’s): style = Pastoral Melancholy (anime, NOT photorealistic); the hallway bullying softened to generic jeering (no racial gesture); dialogue delivered as subtitles; 720p. Known limitation: Mr. Grimsby’s look isn’t consistent between his two shots (no character reference was used for him).

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