Nexus: Dino Demolition Squad

Thump, a backwoods lunatic, rides a spitting dinosaur and fires exploding pustules off the back of a living mortar named Brontenheimer. The empire hired him to win the war, but he keeps blowing up the empire's own soldiers, so Captain Feck has to teach him the difference between the good guys and the bad guys, and Feck is running out of soldiers. A dark-comedy episode of Nexus that PJ Accetturo and Dan Weller wrote around a Tropic Thunder-style lead and his tiny minions, the Bobos, and handed to Chris Capel, who directed, made the images and animation, and edited it. Released as Nexus moved to weekly episodes with Dreamina.

PJ called it "the greatest film we've ever made." It cost $28,775, about $4,000 to $7,000 of it in generation and the rest in contractors' labor, and he put Nexus at 62.5 million views across its episodes. Capel's process, shared with the prompts, was to direct rather than roll the dice: split the work the way a crew does, finding the frame, staging the scene and getting the performance in separate Seedance passes, and lock in each good result as an image or reference before asking for the next. When a shot had the right composition but something wrong inside it, he painted out the wrong part and let Seedance fill it back in.