Subscribe to Our New YouTube Channel!

Hey there, friends and newcomers! I’m thrilled to announce the launch of my brand-new YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@SciExploitation), dedicated entirely to the world of Sci-Exploitation animation and filmmaking, including my passion project, Escape From Planet Omega-12.

For those who don’t know, Escape From Planet Omega-12 is a bold, gritty sci-fi adventure inspired by old-school epics like Forbidden Planet and Princess of Mars, with a dash of the edgy, adventurous spirit you’d find in Heavy Metal or Barbarella. It’s about Tara, a lone woman stranded on a hostile alien world, who must find her way with the help of a quirky robot and a strange alien entity.

This new channel is where I’ll showcase everything related to the Omega-12 universe and my broader Sci-Exploitation brand. Here’s what you can expect:

Right now, you can check out the animatics for the opening scene, which features Tara’s escape pod crash-landing into an alien swamp. This rough cut is the first glimpse into the world we’re building, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

https://youtu.be/wmEU7HnEluY?si=oRxxrGvQCaui-eTK

If you love:

...then this channel is for you.

By subscribing, liking, sharing, and leaving a comment, you’ll not only help this project grow, but you’ll also become part of a community of sci-fi fans who value creativity and storytelling.

The channel is just getting started, but 2025 will be packed with:

How You Can Help:

This is an indie journey fueled by creativity, innovation, and a love for storytelling. Every subscriber, like, and share helps bring Escape From Planet Omega-12 closer to completion. Thank you for being part of this adventure—I can’t wait to hear what you think of the opening animatics and everything else we have in store!

Let’s build something amazing together.

If you’re new here, welcome to my little corner of the internet where I’m chronicling the making of my indie sci-fi project, Escape From Planet Omega-12. For the uninitiated, it’s a film about a stranded woman named Tara, her robot sidekick, and the wild alien world they have to survive. I’m blending practical effects, traditional VFX, and cutting-edge AI to bring it all to life on a shoestring budget.

Now, I’ve talked before about how AI tools like Stable Diffusion, LivePortrait, and Roop have been instrumental in building this world. But today, I want to share something I’ve been experimenting with lately: Nim.Video, and how it’s solving a pretty big problem for me.

Animation is one of the hardest parts of this whole process. Services like Kling, Minimax, and Krea deliver stunning results. I can take a still image of Tara that I made using Stable Diffusion and Photoshop and they’ll animate her fantasically some of the time but they’re way out of my budget for the amount of shots I need. Plus, they can be a little… picky. Tara’s outfit, while true to her character and the film’s Sci-Exploitation tone, sometimes gets flagged, which leads to even more hurdles.

That’s where Nim.Video has really come through for me. It doesn’t deliver the same polished output as those high-end platforms, but it’s flexible and gives me the freedom to generate as many ideas as I need without worrying about restrictions. The quality isn’t perfect, but that’s fine—I’ve found ways to make it work by rolling up my sleeves and refining the results myself. Plus, it’s a startup and startups grow and improve with time, so I think it’s going to be worth sticking with them for the long haul.

Here’s how I’ve been doing it:

Once I get an animation from Nim.Video, the first thing I do is run it through FlowFrames to smooth out the motion and make it feel more natural. Then, I bring the video into After Effects to break it down into a PNG sequence, since my next tool, Upscayl, only works with individual images.

Upscayl lets me batch-upscale those frames, sharpening the details and bringing them closer to the polished look I want. Finally, I reassemble the upscaled frames back into a video. It’s a bit of a process, but the results are well worth the effort, especially for the kind of dynamic visuals I need in Omega-12. They’re both free to download so as my producing partner Doug says, “The price is right.” 

From there, I bring in Roop for face-swapping and LivePortrait to map facial expressions and lip movements onto Tara. These tools are a lifesaver for keeping her look consistent across shots and for making her feel like a living, breathing character, at least so far as an animated movie will give you. I still want this movie to feel like animation, rather than going on the quest for realisum that so many othere AI projects seemed to be striving for. 

I’m also doing something similar with Viggle, which will take a still image and animate it according to a video input you give it. I’ve either been using the performance of actress Isla Cervelli or for the more stunt heavy action, assets from Mixamo to get the action I want. 

For now, this is “good enough” for putting my scenes together. I say good enough because at the end I’ll be feeding these animations back into another service called Krea, which I think I’ve talked about before to really bring the quality up. However, again, their monthly subscription is not cheap so I want to wait until I’ve got something close to final cut before I pay the monthly subscription to use their video refiners. 

I’ll also not that it works with environmental elements, like this animation of water I made using Midjourney and Nim.

This workflow has definitely been a labor of love, and there are still kinks to work out, but it’s given me so much more control over the final product. Every frame gets refined by hand (or at least by tools I’ve chosen), and that means the final look feels less like “just AI” and more like something uniquely mine.

It’s still early days, but I’m excited about where this process is heading. If you’ve got questions about Nim.Video, Upscayl, or any of the other tools I’m using, drop me a comment! And if you’re here to keep up with Escape From Planet Omega-12, stay tuned—there’s plenty more on the way and plenty more info about it that you read by subscribing for free. Or, if you feel like supporting this project and getting access to my pay-walled content, it goes a long way in helping me with this and other projects to come. 

Thanks for being here and for supporting this journey.

Mr. Moonlight 

We have started a YouTube channel for all things Sci-Exploitation. Follow us for sci-fi/fantasy that blends classic, old-school esthetics with a grown-up twist. 

https://www.youtube.com/@SciExploitation

More updates, coming soon. 

I’m just going to jump right into this one with some examples, thoughts, and candid feelings about how Escape From Planet Omega-12 is shaping up. These little video clips are all tests that helped me to learn where I’m going to use AI and where I’m not, to bring this story to life. I’ve been very open about why I feel AI is a tool for artists and especially filmmakers, not a cheat, so I won’t bother to go over all of that again. I’ve been an artist and a writer all of my life, and the advent of this technology does not somehow void that. 

These examples, which are all at the bottom of this post, are all AI-generated with some 3D elements, digital compositing, and painting on top. What you’ll see at the end of this first clip is me trying to figure out how to composite Tara into the scene. 

I think in these examples I’m about 80%, there and the learning experience they gave me will have me 100% there when I create the first scenes, which I will have done by the time you read this but those examples will be for subscribers, only. 

By the way, the reason I’m making this post public is that I want to start getting more content out there to drive subscriptions up. Although AI is supposed to make things inexpensive and faster I’ve found that if I want to stay on the cutting edge of both using all the latest in available programs and keeping ahead of all the other very innovative people using it, for now creating with these tools comes at a premium of both money and time, so your shares and contributions do help.

What I need to focus on next is getting Tara up to the level of beauty I originally conceptualized in my production art. There are ways to upgrade the details on her and enhance the prettyness of her face. I based the character on my wife so she has to be captivating. I’ll be focusing my attention on that aspect of things for the first scenes. 

When I first started this project my real passion was, and still is for environments. If you’ve seen my past work from the pre-AI era of my life, you’ll know that I’ve always been enamored with ways to create fictional worlds and fill them with details like fog, light, insects, and other moving elements, including the camera, that help bring them to life and make them another character in the story. 

Although South American temples are not part of the story, I thought I’d try my hand at them as a way to play around with them as a way to test the limits of making depth mattes with Midjourny and Stable Diffusion, bringing them into Adobe After Effects to make them look like 3D locations that our characters can exist in and interact with. 

I’m not going to lie. I absolutely love the results and with so many free services available right now, like Minimax to generate elements like water, smoke, fire, and whatever else I might need to add to the final composite, it’s an embarrassment of riches. 

But like I said before, none of this stuff comes ready to use, as is. It takes me hours just to generate them, get what I need, and then do the retouching and compositing to stitch it all together. Every image goes through three or four different programs before I then spend time turning it into scenes. Rocks just start out as pictures, they get turned into 3D elements, and then they become part of an arduous process of building a shot. 

Here’s where I’m going to level with you. Although I have help from my producing partner Dough Mayfield and a very small handful of other talented artists, I’m worried if the final product will be enough by the time it’s done. 

I can now produce anything that I could possibly want but so can everyone else and there are some talented people out there aiming for the same goal, I am. Weirdly, more resources mean that the stakes have never been higher to exceed audience expectations. Right now there is some very impressive stuff and where before I wasn’t concerned because most people were just creating vignettes that were novel but often not useful, now I see them pushing the same possibilities that I see but with more talent, time and resources to get them done ahead of me. 

I often wonder if with the realism AI can achieve getting exponentially better with every passing week, will all the extra effort I put into doing it “the hard way” make the difference I thought it would when I started this journey? Will what I produce measure up and resonate with audiences in a way that technology alone can’t do, or will it just seem kind of quaint and low-budget? 

That’s not what I want. I feel like we’re doing something special, here and it is by shear passion and drive, nagging at me like an addiction that I continue on, knowing that Escape From Planet Omega-12 will be worth it, despite the constant exhaustion and yes, sometimes misery that endlessly toiling at it can make me feel. Committing yourself to such projects without any promise of success or recognition can sometimes feel like living in a hopeless and lonely void, wondering if the thing you love is the thing that will come to nothing and leave you heartbroken. Disappointing those I care about is my biggest fear. Letting them down instead of delivering on success and elevating us all to a better tomorrow. That’s why I think a lot of people quit but I just can’t bring myself to do so because paradoxically that would also feel like letting it break me. 

The only way is forward. Another hundred miles and maybe another thousand after that, with what feels like a million people looking at you as if you’re a fool? Who knows? I do think that if you’re reading this, if you’ve made it this far, then you do believe in me and that gives me a little piece of mind, a little hope, and for that, I say thank you. 

Stories matter, and I think this one will, too. Knowing people are waiting for it is the light at the end of the tunnel I need.