David Comfort releases BLACKWOOD, a solo AI horror short made with 480p footage

• BLACKWOOD’s rough cut took two days of solo work, using 480p footage followed by upscaling, according to Comfort’s Halloween post.
• The image-to-video workflow used “gpt 2.5 sunburst,” Seedance 2.5, and a homebuilt agent platform, as Comfort explained in his tool breakdown.
• A subsequent upload presented the film in what Comfort called “full resolution”.

Comfort’s homebuilt agent platform is the standout production credit. His earlier setup used locked character references and timed storyboard cards, according to AGI Hunt’s account of a platform demo. He also reported a separate Kling 4 consistency experiment.

David Comfort, who runs Threshold Cinema, released the rough cut to meet Halloween. He acknowledged that the upscaled 480p footage looked rough, saying he “had to get it out tonight”.

The later upload runs approximately four and a half minutes. A scientist tries to resurrect his dead wife, and succeeds: “Science works. That’s the horror,” Comfort wrote, pitching the story as Frankenstein meets Dracula.

His “full resolution” announcement does not specify the final pixel dimensions.

Comfort identified three parts of his production stack in a reply about the tools:

• Images: “gpt 2.5 sunburst,” in his wording.
• Video: Seedance 2.5.
• Orchestration: a platform he developed himself to run agents, which he said “helps immensely.”

He also identified Seedance 2.5 beneath an earlier five-second horror clip carrying the title THE PRICE OF ETERNITY. Its accompanying line was: “The secret to eternal life, but at what cost?”

Comfort called his work “vibe directing.” An October 26 platform preview, summarized by AGI Hunt, provides more detail about the system he had been building:

1. Reference Studio: character, location, and prop reference sheets are locked against a narrative bible. Only locked references attach to story beats.
2. Beat cards: episodes are divided into timed cards with voice-over plans.
3. Generation stages: cards pass through STORY, STILLS, and MOTION, calling tools including GPT Image and Seedance.
4. Agent coordination: a conversational agent generates references, tracks locked or blocked cards, rewrites prompts after safety-filter rejections, and proposes parallel next steps.

That preview described a 60-card trailer workflow and quoted $0.056 per generated reference and $0.14 per second for 480p drafts. Those figures came from the earlier demonstration; Comfort’s BLACKWOOD tool reply does not provide a film budget.

In a separate reply to Matt Workman, Comfort reported finding a method for consistent, cinematic results with Reference to Video in Kling 4. The reply does not include prompts or settings; his BLACKWOOD tool breakdown names Seedance 2.5.

Another creator, BLVCKLIGHTai, posted a Halloween short with a specific production expense: $200 in credits. The rest of the creator’s accounting was more informal: “two joints, and a few Modelos.”

Comfort also shared coverage of AI filmmaking from The Daily Wire. Reporting from the Austin AI Film Festival, Neal Pollack described creators making full features by themselves, extending the solo-production examples beyond Halloween shorts.