https://youtu.be/956DPSPX4wg?si=qtmPSl70hgzB0OId

Every production company has the same problem. The footage exists, but nobody can find it. A company I freelance for has years of drone, interview, and B-roll footage across dozens of client projects. File names like DJI_0333.MOV tell you nothing about what is in the shot. So I built a search catalog for it. A vision model running on my own PC watched the footage and wrote a plain-language description and keyword tags for each clip. No footage left the building. The result is a single offline search page that covers 41,414 files across 32 projects. Colleagues open it from the shared drive with nothing to install. In the video, "aerial sunset" returns 231 clips. Not one of them has those words in its file name. Every match comes from what the AI saw in the frame. The archive used to be storage. Now it is a library. The next phase is to transcribe interviews and make those searchable as well.

https://youtube.com/shorts/2v3Z9OTC4dA?is=kLHFGd0GDhNqChgb

We’ve been working on the faces of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett for The Death of Billy the Kid. For Billy, we went back to the surviving tintype and Garrett’s written description. For Garrett, we used the portrait engraving from the 1882 book and a photograph published later. The references gave us specific things to work with: Billy’s youthful face and prominent ears, Garrett’s longer face, neat side part and mustache. Then those faces have to keep working when they turn, speak, smile or look worn out. That’s what these studies are for. The outfits need that same attention. The winter designs include light dirt and wear around the coat hems and boots. The idea is to make the clothes feel used, while keeping the character underneath consistent. There are gaps in the evidence. Exact clothing colors, hidden angles and some of the hair are reconstruction. These are our current working designs, grounded in the references we have and still being checked as the book develops.

Getting New Mexico right has become a big part of developing The Death of Billy the Kid. We’re telling the story through Pat Garrett’s account, but turning it into a comic means working through all the things the book leaves for you to imagine. The buildings. The terrain. The light inside a room. What someone can actually see from a doorway. We’ve been building background studies around Lincoln, old Fort Sumner, the Pecos Valley and the places along the pursuit. The look is coming together through warm adobe, dry grass, green along the river, enormous skies and deep blue nights. The winter scenes bring another side of the landscape, with snow caught between the brush and around the buildings. Then comes the less glamorous part: going back through it. More snow where an earlier study didn’t have enough. Night scenes that still read when the image gets smaller. Stairs, porches and doorways that have to make sense when characters move through them. A strong-looking study still leaves questions to answer. Some of the exact historical layouts remain open, and we’re working through those as the book develops. These are some of our current background studies. They’re helping us figure out how this world feels before we carry it through the pages. #GraphicNovels #Comics #BillyTheKid #ProductionDesign #VisualStorytelling