GRUB — the baddest creature in the universe

On a stripped planet, a human dealer and the last
of his kind sell the memory of Earth.

DARK FANTASY · 2026 19 MIN 53 SEC 1920×1080 · 24 FPS ENGLISH · SUBTITLED
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01 — The film

Full film

02 — Story

A last delivery,
and the fare home.

In a future that is not far off, humanity has colonised the galaxy. Every world it reached was taken apart and rebuilt into somewhere people could live, and whatever grew or breathed there first was written off as the price of doing it.

Milo is an eighth-generation colonist. He was born on Nara IX, a mining world the colonies emptied and walked away from. He has never seen Earth. Nobody he knows has.

What he wants is off. A ship of his own, the open galaxy, and somewhere out at the far end of it the planet everybody talks about and nobody has been to. Every deal he makes is fare.

With Grub — the last of his kind, and the only one who has ever had his back — he sells Heaven: a crushed shard that opens you up for a while. It is an escape drug, first and last. It lands as pure ecstasy, a warmth nothing on this planet can give you, and inside that warmth come running water, oceans, a blue nobody here has ever seen. His customers buy it to leave without moving. Milo sells it to leave for real.

One delivery is left, and it is the big one. It takes them into the house of the people who actually own the place, where the violence is polite and comes with a tablecloth. They get out. So does Leyla, who is half of one thing and half of another, and claimed by neither.

What is left is a ship that barely holds together, a fare that is almost paid, and a rumour of a frozen world at the other end of it.

03 — Frames

Colour and lens consistency,
shot after shot.

Consistency is where this kind of work usually falls apart. Here it comes from a workflow built and re-tested run after run: one colour pipeline across the whole picture, one lens logic, one rule set per world — so shots generated weeks apart read as the same camera on the same day.

The road out of Nara IX
Negotiation
The handover
Grub holds the floor
The standoff
Crossing the valley
Invited in
The host
Waiting out the night
Leyla, behind the gun
Milo, on the way out

04 — Format

Written as a pilot.
One planet per arc.

GRUB is a short film, but it was written as the first hour of a series, not as a closed story. The idea is simple: take two characters who have to keep moving, and move them through a new world every arc. The reason it can work is economic. In an AI pipeline a new planet costs what a new location costs, so creature builds, set extensions, crowd work and a city on fire stop being the line items that decide how ambitious the show is allowed to be.

Principle

A world is a look

GRUB is written as a series, and the series is built one planet at a time. Every planet is its own arc and its own look: its own colour script, its own species, its own architecture, its own weather, its own camera grammar. Not the same place with a different sky — a different film that happens to share two characters.

World 01

Nara IX

Anarchy. No state, no economy, no law worth the name. FUEL is the universal fuel and therefore the only currency, so every debt is paid in the thing that keeps everything running. The sun never comes up: the whole planet lives in violet and rust, under permanent night. Violence is ordinary and nobody counts it.

What changes

Everything but them

Milo and Grub are the constant. The palette, the species, the architecture, the language on the signs, the physics of the light: all of it is a variable, and each one resets the tone of the season.

Why it matters

Scope without a budget line

The point of the short is not that it looks expensive. It is that the next nineteen minutes can be set anywhere, in any style, without a single conversation about what can be afforded.

05 — What it is about

Everything in it is
happening somewhere already.

  1. 01

    Extraction, then abandonment

    Nara IX was worth something while there was something in the ground. The colonies took it, exhausted it and left. The people who stay inherit the hole. It is the oldest economic story there is, moved off-world so you can look straight at it.

  2. 02

    Belonging, sold by the gram

    Heaven is an escape drug, and it is also something worse. Ecstasy for a while, and inside the ecstasy a home the user has never had. The most expensive substance on the planet is manufactured belonging, which is exactly what gets sold to second and third generations who are told where they are from and never let in.

  3. 03

    Born here, still foreign

    Milo is human, one hundred per cent, born on the planet, and it buys him nothing. Leyla is half and half and is claimed by neither side. The question the film keeps asking is not where you come from. It is who agrees to recognise you.

  4. 04

    Getting out is the whole plan

    Milo has no intention of fixing Nara IX or running it. He wants a ship and the rest of the galaxy, and at the end of it a planet he has only ever heard about. It is the oldest migrant arithmetic there is: the work is not the life, the work is the ticket, and everything gets measured against the day you leave.

  5. 05

    Home is a person, not a planet

    Earth is a rumour and Nara IX is a hole. What actually holds the film together is a human and a creature with no species in common and no country between them, who are the only home either of them has left. Everything they do is to keep that.

06 — How it was made

One person, one pipeline,
start to final cut.

Twenty minutes of finished dark fantasy with a cast of creatures, a language system, a score and a full graphic layer. No crew, no set, no stock. What follows is the actual order of work, because the order is the craft.

  1. 01

    Script and shot list

    Written first, in scenes, in English, with the dialogue locked before a single frame exists. Generation is expensive; indecision is what makes it expensive.

  2. 02

    A cast that stays the same

    Every character, prop and location is built once as a reusable reference element — face, hide, wardrobe, the exact gold chain. Those elements are then tagged into each shot, which is why the beast in minute two is the same beast in minute nineteen.

  3. 03

    Shot generation

    Each shot is prompted as a block of time, not as a sentence: what the camera does, what changes at 0–2s, at 2–5s, what must never happen. Start and end frames are fixed by hand when the cut demands it.

  4. 04

    Edit

    Assembled and cut in DaVinci Resolve. Rhythm is where an AI film is won or lost: the models give you coverage, the edit gives you a film.

  5. 05

    Colour

    A single signature look across the whole picture — a negative-to-large-format print emulation built as a custom LUT, so eighty generated shots read as one camera and one lab.

  6. 06

    Graphic layer

    The on-screen identity cards — planet, dealer, species, substance — are not a plug-in. They are rendered frame by frame from code, with their own alphabet, their own staging and their own sound design, and composited as a single transparent pass across the film.

  7. 07

    Sound

    Score and design under every card and every title, synthesised and cut to the frame the animation actually lands on.

  8. 08

    Subtitles and delivery

    Dialogue transcribed with word-level timing on GPU, cues rebuilt by hand, English subtitles, master and web encodes out.

19:53final runtime
1080p / 24delivery format
1person, whole pipeline
0stock footage