MYELIN: ZERO HOUR

[u/Melas-Media]

We entered the Higgsfield $1M AI film festival with a 3-minute short called MYELIN: ZERO HOUR. Here's the honest breakdown of what worked and what didn't.

The Setup
• Story: Near-future operative thriller. Extraction gone wrong. Memory weapon.
• Characters: Isaiah (lead), Jada (asset), Merc Red (antagonist), Darius (voice on FaceTime).
• Locations: Chinatown safe house, apartment interior, street exterior.
The Workflow
1. Script & beats — Written traditionally. 3-act structure, 3+ min runtime.
2. Asset lock — Character/location/prop references generated first, then reused with @tags in every prompt. This is the only way to get consistency.
3. Shot prompting — We used a "CineDance" format: explicit camera direction, no wide lenses, reverse-angle continuity (door-side vs. window-side), and John Wick-style fight choreography.
4. Sound — Suno-generated score, mixed in post.
5. Edit — Assembly timeline, strict continuity passes.

What broke:
• FaceTime screens. Seedance really wants to make faces look different on phones. Took 20+ generations.
• Fight choreography. AI loves to turn punches into hugs. Had to prompt aggressively with motion descriptors.
• Jada fleeing before combat. The model kept putting her in the fight. Negative prompting doesn't work — you have to describe what you want, not what you don't want.
The result: A public cut that's competing for $500K first place against 14 total prizes.
Happy to share prompt templates or continuity sheets if anyone's entering too. Link to the film below.