THE DARK COWBOY

THE CHROMA AWARDS & AI RESTORATION

For a long time, the game's in-engine cinematics relied on my older 3D pipeline (using Daz Studio to drive character performances, stitched together in Unreal). When the 2025 CHROMA AWARDS—a competition dedicated to AI video—was announced, I saw a dual opportunity. I could drastically upgrade the visual fidelity of the game's cinematics by integrating the latest generative AI tools into my workflow, and simultaneously submit the revamped opening sequence as a standalone 9-minute film.

THE EXCLUSIVE "BRIDGE" CINEMATIC

To make the film flow as a cohesive narrative, I took the game's official Opening Cinematic and the subsequent Second Cinematic, and merged them together. However, in the actual game, the space between these two cutscenes is pure gameplay—the player explores a cabin, discovers a corpse tangled in extraterrestrial vines, and tracks outlaw footprints into a mountain cave. For this film submission, I generated an exclusive "bridge" cinematic to seamlessly cover this gameplay segment. This means the 9-minute short contains unique narrative connective tissue that players won't see in the final game.

THE HYBRID AI PIPELINE

This was an orchestration of multiple technologies, proving that AI can be used for coherent, character-driven storytelling rather than disconnected montages. The process was driven by a strict script. I used ElevenLabs for the voice acting, tuning it for emotional clarity. Keyframes and character references were generated via Midjourney, Freepik, and LTX Studio. These concepts were then animated and lip-synced using KLING AI. The motion was finally stabilized to 60fps using Flowframes.

The scale of the curation was immense: out of over 4,000 generated images, I painstakingly filtered and refined the results down to the 150 final shots that made the cut. Everything was then brought into Adobe Premiere Pro for the final edit, sound design, and color grading, ensuring the gritty, surreal atmosphere remained completely unified and cohesive from the very first frame to the climactic end.

A LIFETIME PROJECT: UNREAL ENGINE

"The Dark Cowboy" is not merely a short film—it is my most ambitious and longest-running project to date: a full-fledged dark fantasy video game currently in development using Unreal Engine. The game follows a broken gunslinger's quest for vengeance, but instead of a straight path across the frontier, his journey shatters reality itself, pulling him into a surreal, otherworldly realm. It's a story of transformation, where the journey fundamentally changes him before he ever reaches his final duel.