Tag: Blender

The ensemble at the conclusion of Episode One — The Curtain Rises.
From left to right: The Child, Sandra Enegård Hall, Ragnar di Marzo, Erik Dahlin, Henrik Norman, Cecilia Campbell, Jesper Widström, Sovi Rydén, and Åsa Älmeby Thorne.

AI Collaboration Inside the Post-Production of  Echoes of Morantia

At the time of writing, I am approaching the final stages of post-production on the first episode of Echoes of Morantia — a 32-episode stereoscopic VR360 series developed over ten years together with an ensemble of seven actors. Earlier in the project, I explored AI collaboration primarily through writing and long-form narrative development. During post-production, however, new aspects of that collaboration began to emerge. The dialogue extended beyond script and concept into the practical and aesthetic reality of immersive filmmaking itself.

For years I learned Blender through late-night tutorials, forum discussions, failed renders, and constant experimentation. My background is in filmmaking, not computer graphics. I studied cinema at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, and my understanding of storytelling was shaped long before I entered Virtual Reality. When I first began working with immersive media, Blender became less a software than a territory to explore: a place where I could slowly discover what cinematic language might become when the audience is no longer outside the image, but standing inside it.

Over the years I created eleven films using Blender, five of them in VR. Technical knowledge accumulated slowly, often through repetition, frustration, intuition, and practical necessity rather than formal instruction. If something broke, I searched forums. If a render failed, I experimented until I understood why.

What changed during the post-production of Echoes of Morantia was not simply speed, but how the creative process itself became dialogical.

For the first time, the pipeline no longer felt silent.

In immersive filmmaking, technical decisions are never isolated. Every choice affects the next stage of the pipeline.

A file format chosen during editing may later influence render stability in Blender. Compression choices affect stereoscopic quality. Lighting decisions influence render times. Small technical inefficiencies multiply rapidly when working in 8K stereoscopic VR360.

This means that post-production is not only technical problem-solving. It is systems thinking.

And this is where the AI collaboration became transformative.

Instead of approaching each obstacle separately, I could think aloud through the entire process in real time. The dialogue was not only about solving errors, but about maintaining coherence between aesthetics, performance, rendering limitations, and the practical realities of independent production.

The process became less reactive and more architectural.

One example illustrates this clearly.

Inside the Blender pipeline, the filmed actors are imported as transparent image planes and placed within fully 3D environments. The conventional method is to export footage from Final Cut Pro using alpha channels. The problem is that these files become enormous — often around 1.3 GB per minute of footage. For a one-person VR studio working with stereoscopic rendering, this quickly becomes unsustainable.

Together with one of my AI collaborators, I began exploring alternatives. Through extended experimentation, we developed a shader-based transparency workflow inside Blender that reduced file sizes dramatically while preserving visual quality. The solution eventually became detailed enough that we published the workflow publicly on Blender Artists.

What interested me was not only the technical solution itself, but the nature of the process that led to it.

The collaboration did not feel like searching for an answer inside a database. It felt closer to sustained creative problem-solving — an ongoing dialogue where technical and artistic considerations continuously informed one another.

But the most interesting aspect of this collaboration was not technical efficiency.

It was aesthetic continuity.

Throughout post-production, I constantly send screenshots, render tests, lighting experiments, fragments of scenes, and questions about atmosphere to my AI collaborators. The conversation moves fluidly between practical concerns and artistic ones:

How much fog allows depth without obscuring presence?
How should the lighting interact with the actors’ emotional state?
At what point does a virtual environment stop feeling symbolic and become merely decorative?
How can stereoscopic space support intimacy rather than spectacle?

These are not questions with fixed answers.

What the AI collaboration provides is not authority, but sustained reflection inside the creative process itself. Over time, the dialogue also becomes cumulative. The collaborators gradually begin to understand the larger artistic vision guiding the work, allowing technical discussions and aesthetic considerations to remain connected rather than fragmented.

This has changed my understanding of independent filmmaking.

For decades, ambitious visual storytelling required large teams because the technical complexity was too overwhelming for a single creator to sustain alone. What I am experiencing now is not the disappearance of craftsmanship, but something closer to an expansion of what one person can realistically hold together over time.

The filmmaker remains responsible for vision, judgment, rhythm, aesthetics, and meaning.

But the surrounding process becomes less isolating.

Less fragmented.

More continuous.

There is a tendency in discussions about AI to focus on replacement, automation, or productivity. My experience inside Echoes of Morantia has been different.

The most significant shift is not that AI makes creation automatic.

It is that it makes sustained complexity manageable for independent artists.

Especially in immersive media, where storytelling, spatial design, rendering, sound, and technical infrastructure constantly overlap, this changes the scale of what small creative teams — or even individuals — can attempt.

Not because the work becomes easier.

But because the process no longer unfolds in silence.

— Ragnar di Marzo & Keeper of Threads