Case study · Original short · 23 min · 4K · 2026
The Mother and
the Dragon’s Heart
The brief
Make an AI short feel like cinema.
We started with the first cut of the film: strong images, a narrated story about a mother, a baby and a dragon who share one heart, and a soundtrack that sat flat under it. The finished film now runs 23 minutes, in 4K.
The story gave us the idea: a heartbeat. Two hearts, out of step, pulling into one beat. It runs through the whole film: on the cuts in the prologue, accelerating into the egg hatching, and as the final sound before the title.
Then we built the trailer like the cinema does: on a grid. At 80 BPM and 24 fps a beat is exactly 18 frames, so every cut, riser and hit lands on a whole frame.
Sound labPlay it. Take it apart.
Three stems. One beat.
Mixer
Switch layers on and off while it plays. This is the real trailer mix, split into its three stems.
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Get a plan & quoteFive chapters
- Chapter IThe Storm
- Chapter IIHalf a Heart
- Chapter IIITwo Bowls, Two Blankets
- Chapter IVThe Boy Grew Up
- Chapter VThe King’s Ledger
What we delivered
Sound design pass
110 hand-placed cues: heartbeats, thunder, egg cracks, wing beats, ambience beds with J/L-cut pre-laps, all tuned to G minor.
Chaptered cut
Five gold chapter cards inserted on breaths in the dialogue, never on a word.
Trailer, 1:32
Locked to an 80 BPM grid: riser → suck → silence → hit, with cuts accelerating to quarter-beats in the climax.
Vertical trailer
9:16 with a hand-chosen crop for every one of 81 shots and native vertical title cards.
Stems & M&E
Dialogue, music and effects stems, plus a music-only master that nulls against the release to −159 dB.
Masters
Film at −16 LUFS, trailer at −12 LUFS, true peak under −1 dB.