Title- Proof of Life

How I made it:

I built this 45-second psychological thriller shot-by-shot in Renoise, starting with a full production script that locked camera angles, lighting, and a six-beat structure before generating a single frame. A married couple stages a fake hostage video to extort money from a target her reaction plays intense but a touch too rehearsed, and a slow camera reframe reveals her husband in the room with her, coaching her lines half a second ahead of her delivery, building to a final reveal of the actual extortion demand on screen.

To keep both characters consistent across every shot, I created detailed reference sheets for each physical description, wardrobe, posture, and a performance-progression ladder mapping how her expression shifts from shot to shot then locked those as FacePass references before batch generating. The trickiest element was a screen graphic (the extortion demand) that needed to stay perfectly legible across multiple takes, so I composited it in as a static asset rather than letting the model regenerate small text each time. For sound, I built a looping piano motif with a deliberate key-change timed to land exactly on the reveal, so the twist registers in the ear a half-beat before the eye catches up and a single unresolved low tone carries through to the final cut to black, so the ending stays unsettled instead of neatly resolved.