PJ Accetturo says labor accounted for his film’s $29,575 budget

• A Nexus short cost $29,575 and took 10 days. Accetturo attributed the spend to labor, with AI filmmakers charging roughly $1,000 a day, in his budget reply.
• Production mixed 3D-guided Seedance footage with prompt-only generations, choosing preferred angles, according to his follow-up.
• Claude ran the Blender workflow despite nobody on the team having used Blender before, he said in his workflow thread.

A rough Blender stadium supplies the camera plan for a fantasy death course, a gloriously unglamorous use of Claude. The kitchen-scene prompt specifies which glass can break and exactly how a character must wink.

Filmmaker PJ Accetturo reported the $29,575 budget for Sky Line Heist, an episode in the Nexus anthology. Asked where the money went, he said it all went to labor and put most AI filmmakers at “$1k-ish per day.”

He also identified Dreamina as the official sponsor of all Nexus shorts.

Generating or restyling takes still leaves substantial curation and editing work, as one reply argued. That commenter said assembling those takes into a cohesive film currently requires just as much effort.

For Maki Death Games, another Nexus episode, the team used Claude to run Blender without prior experience in the application. Accetturo outlined the setup in his published walkthrough:

1. Lock the location. Establish the stadium’s look in Midjourney, then use Nano Banana and Seedream 5 to produce five variants.
2. Connect the applications. Install Blender and a Blender connector for Claude.
3. Build a rough set. Give Claude the locked stadium image and request a low-poly, gray-box scale model. Accetturo said a near-perfect replica took under five minutes.

Blender camera paths paired with generated Nexus footage

The Blender clip becomes a motion reference for Seedance. His causeway prompt assigns it the route, obstacles, camera curves and rough timing, while explicitly rejecting its weightless motion and flat gray shading.

Separate still references supply the arena’s appearance and the creature’s identity. Fire, lightning and moving water are requested in the final generation even though they are absent from the Blender preview.

The team also generates shots without the 3D reference, then mixes the two approaches according to which angles it prefers.

Before animating Sky Line Heist, the team generated hundreds of still references. Accetturo’s production breakdown organizes that preparation around four kinds of assets:

• Characters: Jace, Sable and Beaumont’s costume variants.
• Creatures: Goldie, a squid that spews liquid gold, and winged air-fish.
• Locations: The gilded skytrain and its kitchen carriage.
• Props: Weapons, clothing accessories and character gear.

Asked about making these images, he said the team usually uses “GPT2 image.”

Concept art and references for Sky Line Heist

Accetturo describes his animation direction as physical behavior rather than emotion labels. His example in the animation breakdown replaces “Jace feels sorry for the air-fish” with: “Jace stops mid-stride. His eyes move cage to cage. Jaw tightens. He lowers the pistol a few inches.”

The kitchen-car prompt requests four shots, each lasting two seconds:

1. Impact: Jace winces as Sable shatters a fish tank in the blurred background.
2. Reaction: He sighs through his nose, keeping his eyes open.
3. Dialogue: He turns toward Sable and says, “Really, sis?”
4. Flourish: Sable finishes her swing, sweeps the rapier to her side, looks toward Jace, smiles through her eyes and gives one single-eye wink.

Additional continuity and sound constraints specify:

• Jace remains upright, feet planted and arms folded.
• Sable keeps her mask on and carries one rapier; her strikes target fish cages, never train windows.
• Audio contains dialogue, train ambience, glass impacts and foley, with no music.

The kitchen-car performance shared with the prompt

Accetturo shared the Blender and Dreamina workflow guide for free. In a separate project-file announcement, he said every prompt and animation was available in Dreamina Web’s Canvas, under “Showcase Nexus” and “See how it’s made.”