This took a long time to make. And when I thought it was done, I ended up going back and adding more, because I feel like I only get one shot at this.
It took 15 days, 1,696 images, and over 500 videos to get to this point. And probably about 80 hours of actual designing, editing, and directing everything to put together a short film that clocks in at 15 minutes and 22 seconds, making it the longest narrative content that Digital Dreams has ever produced.
This is probably the longest sustained amount of effort I’ve put into a creative project in a long time. It took so long to make that I actually took a break in the middle to make Mat Exposure:
But it was worth it, because I got to work with two lovely ladies who deserve to be more than just one-shot appearances.
You’ve met Eva and Hailey before:
And they’ve been on my mind. Even if they weren’t originally who this project was about.
The original idea was to bring back another character, Heather, from the 90s Channel Surfing Series:
I’d been experimenting with the Edit function to create new scenes and I had wanted to make a short horror film in the style of a 1970s giallo, with the working title of “A Torn Photograph in a Field of Lunatics.”
I thought about updating Heather’s look also:
And I thought about Heather as a standalone character – maybe Jimmy James was a hinderance in this case – I mean, I love the character, but nobody is clicking on the video to watch him.
So I started to think about the set and the world that Heather might inhabit:
And you can see in the layout designs the NES console was creeping into some of the work. And as much as I liked Heather, there was a disconnect because I just don’t think she’s a girl that’s into gaming that way.
And as I struggled with this idea of building a world just so I could tell a different story that wasn’t set in that world, I started to feel like I was moving in the wrong direction.
I already knew a girl who liked video games: Eva’s first apperance was IN AN ARCADE.
In fact, she was playing a game called Shadow Doll [Shadow Doll was actually Eva’s code name when the character was being developed]. And, being part of the Bunny Brigade, naturally, Eva had a gaming friend: Hailey.
And things started to fall into place.
Eva is a shy girl, so having a trailer out in the desert makes sense – and Hailey is literally rolling around in an armored Hummer, which is the perfect set up for a gaming rig.
And I knew there were going to be problems trying to do this.
Because, as we’ve talked about a length, Digital Dreams primarily uses Grok Imagine to create images and videos – and generally speaking it works very well – the problem is that because of the controversy surrounding bad actors using the Edit function in Grok to create deep fake porn, it is EXTREMELY difficult to edit together 2 separate images of nude females into one image.
There was a possible work around, which was to just generate a new base image that had both characters in it and use whatever had the closest resemblance:
The results were intersting – and I like some of the doppelgangers. But ultimately, what I liked about Eva and Hailey from a design standpoint was that, despite the fact that they had the bunny costumes, which are very sexualized, they were not necessarily hypersexualized characters. Eva has an innocent face and Hailey is a tall athletic girl – they’re beautiful, but they don’t look like porn stars.
And I wanted them to have a girl next door quality to them – which the doppelganger images just didn’t evoke – the doppelganger girls are absolutely gorgeous, but they look artificial – as characters, I think Eva and Hailey have a very natural quality to them.
And that’s where the video game review format became central to the project – in part because I am getting old and I’m feeling nostalgic for the era of Let’s Play video game reviewers – and in part because those types of shows often had co-hosts or guests who were not physically in the same space as one another.
Of course now I doubled the work load since this necessitated now only that we create a trailer for Eva but also a “rig” for Hailey.
For people who don’t remember, this was the original image of Eva:
This is the prompt we used to edit that image and create Eva’s trailer:
Create a new image based on this prompt, using the base image as a reference: a horror movie marathon set at night in the desert inside of a trailer. Medium shot of the girl sitting on a hot pink velvet couch. A table with a bowl of popcorn, a bottle of crystal skull vodka, and a cosmopolitan cocktail is sitting next to her. The walls have horror movie and video game posters on them. There is a Nintendo Entertainment System hooked up to a tv. Dominated by rich yellow and green color tones
There are a lot of good base images in there – and there’s arguments for choosing one over the other. I particularly liked the vodka bottle designs that have a white skull embellishment on them [which unfortunately couldn’t be replicated every time]. The branding on the bottle sometimes comes out as “Crystal” and sometimes can be read as “Occult.”
Canonically it’s “Occult” Vodka made from British Wheat.
This was the main image of the trailer and Eva that we ended up going with. There’s a few reasons we went with this one; first of all, it had a good recreation of Eva’s hairstyle in the original image and captured how she has a few loose strands in her bob cut; second, it’s the only image that got her streaked eye makeup correct; and it also got a lot of little details correct, the size of the NES, the CRT TV, the visual of the popcorn bucket, and Eva’s tattoos.
Canonically that red drink sitting on the table with her is a cosmpolitan.
We also needed some shots of Eva playing video games, so we tried this Edit prompt:
Edit her pose so she is holding an NES controller as if she is playing a video game with it
Which quickly became a fiasco, because while I love Grok, it has no idea how video games work:
But that was a boring pose anyway. So this was the next Edit prompt:
Create a new image using the base image as a reference. The girl is sitting kneeling on the ground in front of the TV, her back is to the camera and she is holding a controller in her hands and playing a video game
Create a new image using the base image as a reference. The girl is sitting kneeling on the ground in front of the TV, her back is to the camera and she is holding a controller in her hands and playing a video game. She is looking over her shoulder at the camera. The TV screen is displaying a test signal pattern
Now, the mistake I realized halfway through was that I had Eva turn her face away from the camera – and you never do that with AI image and video because once you lose visual of the face you’ve created the potential for inconsistent facial features and appearance drift. Which is why the second prompt has her looking at the camera.
Another issue that was unavoidable with this – and I knew it was going to be a problem the moment Eva’s character was created – no AI image generator is going to have 100% consistency as to the tattoos.
And I decided I didn’t care – in the past I’ve avoided using characters with tattoos for this reason – but Eva was the girl I wanted to use for this story and she had been asking to do something different – so the girl stays in the picture.
And really, of all the logistical concerns in this project – inconsistent tattoos were the least of our worries.
We needed a little more pose variety:
Remove the popcorn from the picture. Change her pose so that her legs are wide apart and she is covering her pussy with both hands
And at some point I had the bright idea to try and get a different angle of the room, which did not yield the expected results:
Rotate the camera 90 degrees clockwise so that the image shows a side view of the girl and similar perspective for the rest of the room
AI tools are interesting because even with models that use natural language, you have to be precise in your word choice sometimes, which is why there’s such tortured language as to the movement of the camera – which of course ultimately made no difference because Grok decided to just tilt the room in half the shots:
By far though, this was the best result:
And to be fair to the AI in this instance, the geography, layout, and size of Eva’s trailer makes no sense. If you look at some of the other images, I don’t think the ceiling is actually tall enough for her to stand up. And as you’ll see later, the size of the trailer from the outside also leaves some questions about spatial relationships.
It’s not that we didn’t think about these things. We did.
The explanation we decided on was that the trailer is sort of a pocket dimension – and there may be some metaphysical reason why Eva’s trailer is out in the middle of the desert beyond her being a bit of an introvert.
Hailey was a little more straightforward.
This was her original apperance:
And this was how we used the Edit function to change that:
Use the image as a reference to generate a new image based on this prompt: The girl is sitting inside of the interior of a military vehicle. There is a monitor on the wall behind her and a complicated series of lights and switches are on the walls. The scene is lit by glowing blue LED light strips
The problem I didn’t expect was that in the new “rig” location it became very difficult to see Hailey’s ears. And I knew there was a possibility that in animating those images, her ears would become part of the background rather than a fixture of her costume.
So we tried this edit:
Make her bunny ears more brightly illuminated and clearly sitting on her head
And I don’t know what I was expecting when I typed that in, but this is another situation where the AI got it right even if the humans operating it didn’t know what they were doing:
Because, wow, that REALLY created a character for Hailey. “Gaming Ears.”
The problem of course, is she doesn’t have her gaming PC in this photo. So we had to fix that:
on the right side of the image, add a military storage container with a mini PC sitting on top of it with a portable monitor and an rgb keyboard plugged into it
Now, one thing that was becoming apparent as more edits were done: the image quality was not going to survive.
There is a fix for that:
Upscale this image to the highest possible resolution (4K or beyond). Dramatically enhance sharpness, fine detail, and overall clarity across every part of the scene. Refine skin texture, individual hair strands, the glowing bunny ears, black lace thigh-high stockings, the small tattoo, cockpit controls, monitors, RGB keyboard, wires, and blue LED lighting. Boost vibrancy and realism of the cool blue glow and screen elements. Keep the exact same composition, camera angle, subject pose, expression, body, nudity, and artistic style with zero changes to content or elements
Although sometimes the end result was not improved as much as I would have hoped [and sometimes I forgot to upscale before making video] any small increase in image quality is helpful.
Haiely also needed some pose variety:
Change her pose so that she is sitting with her legs apart and her hands covering her pussy
edit her pose so that she is kneeling on the chair with her back to the camera, her legs slightly apart, and looking over her shoulder at the camera
edit her pose so that she has one foot on the ground
Change her pose so that she is sitting with her legs apart and her feet resting on the chair and the container and both her hands covering her pussy
Edit her pose so that her legs are crossed and she is leaning back in her chair looking up at the ceiling with her hands behind her head
We did make one more attempt to see if we could generate a doppelganger of Haiely in Eva’s images:
And realistically, if we had chosen one of these images and said that was Hailey now – I don’t know that anybody would have cared. Except for Hailey. And I guess I wanted the challenge.
Because it wasn’t that this was impossible to do.
Wan, Qwen, Seedream, Seedance – these are all tools that we could use to create the things we couldn’t make with Grok.
It was just going to cost money – and take a lot more time than any of us initially thought it would…
In Part 2 we discuss how we “inveted” a bootleg NES game for Eva to review [and why that was a terrible idea]:
In the meantime, check out some popular posts on Digital Dreams:
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