Case Study · Episode 12 · AI Dream-Chase Short

CHASED AWAKE: seven wonders, one dream

It's the dream everyone has had — something is behind you, every exit leads somewhere stranger, and you can't stop running. Thalia, a teenage lucid dreamer, sprints through the seven wonders of the modern world with a Shadow of black smoke and obsidian one step behind her — until, on the arm of Christ the Redeemer at sunrise, she stops running and turns around. Fifty-five seconds, nine scenes, no dialogue. Written with Claude, storyboarded end-to-end in Google Flow's Storyboard Studio, animated frame by frame.

MediumAI dream-chase short · 9 scenes

PipelineGoogle Flow · Storyboard Studio

Storyboard29 frames · 15 locked assets

Working titleSeven Doors

Length48 seconds · 1440p · 16:9

The finished film · 48 seconds, nine scenes, seven wonders — Topaz-upscaled to 1440p, scored with "Worlds in Motion." The poster frame is the climax: the moment she stops running.

Overview

Board the whole film before you spend a second of video

The method this time: treat the AI studio like a real one. A finished shot-by-shot script first; then a full storyboard pass in Google Flow's Storyboard Studio, where every character, wonder and prop is locked as a reference asset before any video is generated. By the time the video engines ran, there was no creative decision left to gamble on — only motion.

9Scenes · no dialogue

29Storyboard frames

15Locked assets

7Wonders of the world

48sOne accelerating chase

The Pipeline

Step by step

The Script

The film was written before any tool was opened. Working with Claude, the idea — "a teen chased through the seven wonders, each exit leading into the next, until she wakes" — became a nine-scene screenplay with the camera grammar built in: an ECU of glowing eyes to open, high angles and extreme wides while she's hunted, a deliberate switch to a low angle the moment she stops running. Scene durations shrink as the chase accelerates, then the longest shot of the film is held for the turn.

A second Claude pass converted each scene plus its reference frame into one production-ready paragraph — a single continuous prompt carrying character description, action, camera move, lighting, sound design and grade, ready to paste into any video model.

Claude · writer's room One paragraph per scene

Scene 2 prompt (abridged)

Ultra-realistic cinematic extreme wide shot at foggy purple dusk on the Great Wall of China: Thalia … sprinting away from camera as the Wall snakes toward a watchtower whose doorway blazes with warm golden portal light; behind her the bricks tear loose and swarm into a churning mass of black smoke veined with molten gold … low drone track following her run … sound design of pounding footsteps, grinding masonry, her ragged breathing … no dialogue, 4K photorealistic, no text or watermark.

Fig. 1 — the master-prompt format: framing first, then subject, threat, portal, camera, sound, grade. Every scene got exactly one of these.

The Studio

Inside Google Flow: New project → Tools → Discover → Storyboard Studio, visual style set to Realistic at the door — the style choice cascades into every asset and frame generated after it.

The script window takes the story as a prompt and returns a proper screenplay — scene headings, action lines, transitions — which was then rewritten line by line to match the Claude draft. The screenplay is the project's spine: every asset and storyboard frame Flow generates from here on refers back to it.

Google Flow · Storyboard Studio Style: Realistic

Storyboard Studio's script editor showing the Seven Doors screenplay with scene headings and transitions

Fig. 2 — the script tab: screenplay formatting with scene headings, sound notes and a WHIP PAN transition, editable like a document.

The Cast

The Assets tab is where continuity is won. Autofill read the screenplay and proposed the cast: Thalia — warm copper skin, waist-length windswept black hair, crimson silk tunic, charcoal leggings, tan parkour boots, a gold sun-dial pendant — and the Shadow, a shapeshifter of volcanic smoke and jagged obsidian, veined with pulsing gold.

Each was generated as a character sheet on a neutral background — portrait plus full-body turnaround — so every later frame draws from the same reference. Flow even wrote them backstories: Thalia is a lucid dreamer who can reshape the dream through touch; the Shadow is her own anxiety, guarding the subconscious.

Autofill characters Nano Banana image gen

Thalia · character sheet

The Shadow character sheet — obsidian jaguar form with gold veins, face and full-body reference

The Shadow · jaguar form

Fig. 3 — the two-view character sheets. The Shadow's mirror-chrome face is the film's ending hidden in plain sight: what she's running from reflects her.

The World

Eleven locations and two props, all autofilled from the screenplay and then curated: the seven wonders, plus the connective tissue — the bedroom, the Siq canyon, the Treasury facade, El Castillo — and the two objects that carry the story's magic: the Intihuatana stone Thalia slams her palm onto, and the Taj Mahal snow globe that ends the film on her nightstand.

Each location arrives as a four-view board — establishing wide, detail, alternate angle, atmosphere — so the storyboard stage can cut around a place without reinventing it. The glowing gold portal is already present in the location plates, keeping the film's one recurring visual rule consistent from the start.

11 locations · 2 props Four-view boards

Storyboard Studio assets tab showing Thalia, the Shadow, and location boards for the Bedroom, Great Wall, Petra and the Treasury

Fig. 4 — the Assets tab: characters and four-view location boards, one Autofill away from the screenplay.

Great Wall of China location board — four views with the glowing golden watchtower door

Great Wall · location board

Petra Treasury location board — four views of the carved sandstone facade

The Treasury · location board

Intihuatana stone prop render on neutral background

Prop · Intihuatana stone

Taj Mahal snow globe prop render with gold glitter on mahogany base

Prop · the snow globe

Fig. 5 — world and props as clean reference plates. The snow globe was designed asset-first so the film's final shot and Scene 1's blurred background could show the identical object.

The Storyboard

The Storyboard tab holds the film's metadata — every scene from the screenplay, with an Autofill Scene button per scene. Flow generated 29 frames across the 9 scenes, each one linked to the reference assets it uses, so Thalia's tunic, the Shadow's obsidian and the wonders' architecture stay consistent frame to frame.

Every frame carries three layers of intent, not just a picture: a visual description, a motion description (the camera move), and an audio description (the sound design). That trio is effectively a pre-written video prompt — the storyboard does the prompt engineering for you.

Autofill scene · 29 frames Visual + motion + audio per frame

Storyboard Studio's storyboard tab showing Taj Mahal and Christ the Redeemer scene frames with the frame inspector open on The Settling Gold

Fig. 6 — the Storyboard tab: frames per scene on the left, the inspector on the right with frame description and its linked reference assets (Bedroom · Taj Mahal · Snow Globe).

One frame's metadata — Scene 01 · "The Golden Awakening"

Visual — extreme close-up on Thalia's eyes as they snap open; irises pulse with an unnatural golden light cutting through the dark bedroom.

Motion — camera locked in a tight macro shot, capturing the minute detail of the glowing irises.

Audio — the heartbeat spikes in volume and tempo; a faint ethereal hum rises in pitch.

Fig. 7 — what a storyboard frame actually stores. Picture, camera and sound — three prompts in one object.

The Save

Before closing the project, one non-negotiable habit: Save the story. Flow downloads the entire production as a single local JSON — this project's file weighs 69.6 MB because it embeds everything: the full screenplay in markdown, all 15 assets with their images encoded inline, and all 29 frames with their visual, motion and audio text.

The warning is earned: clicking Done without saving can leave the project unrecoverable in the cloud. With the JSON on disk, the whole film — cast, world, board — reloads anywhere, anytime. It's the production bible and the backup in one file.

Save the story → local JSON 69.6 MB · everything inline

Inside the save file

{
  "projectTitle": "SEVEN DOORS",
  "globalStyle": "Realistic",
  "fullMarkdown": "# …the entire screenplay…",
  "assets": [ 15 × character · location · prop,
    each with physicalCharacteristics,
    backstory and inline images ],
  "frames": [ 29 × visual · motion · audio ]
}

Fig. 8 — the anatomy of the 69.6 MB project save. The screenplay, the cast sheets and every frame's intent, one portable file.

The Animation

Video generation ran frame by frame, two tabs open — the storyboard on one side, the media library on the other. For each shot: drag the chosen frame into the agent prompt, paste the scene's production-ready paragraph, and swap character mentions for the avatar logic names defined in the Characters section — that's what keeps faces (and, in dialogue films, voices) consistent across clips.

Engine settings per shot: Omniflash as the cost-effective default — especially when a scene holds more than two characters — aspect ratio locked to 16:9 throughout. Animation prompts follow one discipline: preserve the frame, choreograph only the change — the creature dissolves, the glitter settles, the camera barely moves. Then the clips went to an external editor for the cut.

Frame → agent prompt Omniflash · 16:9

Image-to-video prompt (abridged) — the climax

Animate this exact frame preserving its composition, characters and lighting: … the creature continues to disintegrate in slow majestic motion, obsidian fragments igniting into golden embers that sweep upward in a great spiraling arc … her body holding still and unafraid … camera holds nearly locked with a very slow push-in, stone arm geometry remaining rigid and unchanged … the girl remains perfectly stable … no dialogue, 4K photorealistic.

Fig. 9 — the animation discipline: the still owns the composition, the prompt owns only the motion. Stability instructions ride at the front of the prompt.

The Board

Nine scenes, one golden thread

The hero frame of each scene. Watch the film's one recurring rule: every exit — door, fissure, trapdoor, cenote, stone, pool, reflection — glows the same warm gold, so the audience always knows where "out" is. And gold is also the color of her eyes, the shockwave, the shatter, and the glitter in the snow globe: the way out was hers the whole time.

Scene 1 — extreme close-up of Thalia's eyes glowing gold in the dark bedroom

01 · The golden awakening

Scene 2 — Thalia sprints along the Great Wall as bricks lift into the air behind her

02 · The Great Wall

Scene 3 — Thalia scrambles to her feet before the Treasury at Petra as shadows churn in the doorway

03 · Petra

Scene 4 — the Shadow's stone-jaguar paw slams into the moonlit Colosseum arena beside Thalia

04 · The Colosseum

Scene 5 — over the serpent Shadow's coils, Thalia sprints down Chichén Itzá toward the jungle

05 · Chichén Itzá

Scene 6 — Thalia slams her palm onto the glowing Intihuatana stone at Machu Picchu

06 · Machu Picchu

Scene 7 — Thalia's boots strike the reflecting pool at the Taj Mahal, shattering the Shadow's reflection

07 · The Taj Mahal

Scene 8 — extreme wide aerial of Thalia on the arm of Christ the Redeemer above a sea of sunrise clouds

08 · Christ the Redeemer

Scene 9 — the Taj Mahal snow globe on the nightstand, gold glitter settling, alarm clock reading 6:18

09 · The settling gold

Continuity check — same tunic, same pendant, same boots, same gold across nine locations and three times of day. That's the asset lock doing its job.

The Cut

Pacing by subtraction

The chase works because every scene is shorter than the audience expects, and the film's longest held shot is the one where nothing chases her at all. The timings below are the shooting plan; the finished cut runs 48 seconds — tighter still, as chases should be.

TC	Scene	Beat	Framing	Dur.
0:00	01 · Bedroom, night	Her eyes snap open, glowing gold	ECU	4s
0:04	02 · Great Wall	The Wall dissolves into the Shadow; she runs	EWS · high	7s
0:11	03 · Petra	Tumbles out of the Treasury; sandstorm behind	WS · low	6s
0:17	04 · Colosseum	The stone jaguar's paw slams down	MS · handheld	6s
0:23	05 · Chichén Itzá	The serpent pours down the pyramid	OTS	6s
0:29	06 · Machu Picchu	Palm on the Intihuatana — gold shockwave	MS → CU	5s
0:34	07 · Taj Mahal	She runs on the water; the Shadow lives in the reflection	ECU · slow-mo	6s
0:40	08 · Christ the Redeemer	She stops. Turns. The Shadow shatters to gold	EWS → low MS	9s
0:49	09 · Bedroom, morning	Awake. A smile. The glitter settles in the globe	ECU	6s

The camera argument — high angles and extreme wides while she's prey; the film's only low angle on Thalia arrives the moment she stops running. The grammar hands her the power before the story does.

The Footage

Raw clips, straight from the engine

Ungraded, unedited generations — each one animated from its locked storyboard frame with a motion-only prompt. The stills carry the composition; the clips only have to move.

The Wall · scene 02

The serpent · scene 05

The water run · scene 07

The wake · scene 09

Worth pausing on — in the water run, the Shadow exists only in the reflection: above the waterline there's nothing behind her. Dream logic the image stage made cheap and the video stage made move.

Behind the Scenes

What we learned (and what nearly broke)

The honest notes — six lessons this film paid for.

Fix the still, not the prompt

The climax kept warping — a person standing on a statue's arm is geometry video models love to melt. Rewriting the video prompt never fixed it. Regenerating the still — with the Shadow already mid-shatter, so the clip only had to finish the dissolve — fixed it in one take. When motion breaks, move the problem upstream to the image.

One emotion per clip

The wake-up asked for fear → relief → smile in five seconds; the engine rushed it and the smile read fake. The fix was editorial, not generative: generate only freeze, breathe, blink, soften and let the cut to the snow globe deliver the smile. The edit is an emotion engine too.

Split the beat

A sprint down steep pyramid steps is one of the hardest motions in current models — legs jitter and slide. Plan B was two shots: a near-static reaction close-up (smoke erupting above her), then the wide OTS chase where her figure is small enough to stay clean. Two easy generations beat one impossible one.

Name the dream, not the device

The working title Seven Doors died in review: only two exits are literally doors — the rest are a fissure, a trapdoor, a cenote, a stone, a pool. Chased Awake names what the film is actually about — the dream everyone has had — and gives the ending away only after you've seen it.

Early tokens win

Video models weight the front of a prompt. Stability instructions — animate this exact frame, the girl remains perfectly stable, stone geometry rigid and unchanged — moved to the opening clause of every animation prompt. Style adjectives went to the back, where they can't outvote the physics.

Save the story. Always.

Storyboard Studio's local save is the whole production in one JSON — 69.6 MB with the screenplay, all 15 asset sheets and all 29 frames embedded. Clicking Done without it can orphan the cloud project. The file reloads everything; it became the production bible this case study was written from.

Toolbox

Everything used, and what it did

Google Flow · Storyboard Studio
Script → assets → 29-frame storyboard

THE STUDIO

Nano Banana
Character sheets, location boards, props & frames

IMAGE GEN

Veo & Omniflash engines
Frame-locked image-to-video, 16:9

VIDEO GEN

Claude Code
Script, shot grammar, prompts & this case study

THE PRODUCER

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