# SPEND

- Date: 2026-11-11
- Type: film
- Credit: The Butcher's Brain
- Genre: Drama, Thriller
- Artists: [The Butcher's Brain](https://aifilmhistory.org/artist/the-butcher-s-brain)
- Made with: Cuelist
- Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwWPiZMcz7o
- URL: https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/spend-playground

A mother and her eight-year-old son cross a country that has stopped working, where the power lines still hang but the only law left is what you can carry, what you can take and who lets you pass. Their way out is a dam a day's walk away that everyone calls the Wall. She is a thief by necessity, he is learning her tricks faster than she would like, and their rule is take what you need, nothing else. Then he takes something they don't need: a small carved wooden box, heavier than it looks.

Seb Ungrad wrote and directed the 25-minute drama as the pilot of PLAYGROUND, an anthology of ten films by ten directors for Storybook Studios, each in a different world and connected only by the same box, the same five notes and an origin no one reveals. It was made entirely in Cuelist, an AI production platform, from the script and visual development through shot generation, sound and review, with Thabo Mlangeni as fellow AI artist, and built on two visual registers: a flat, grey, unforgiving reality and a second one that appears only when the story allows it. Every shot was directed and iterated by hand, with performance, continuity and pacing treated as on a live-action set. A year after his single-creator shorts, it is a long-form drama with a full production team behind it, entered in the Chroma Awards.

Links:
- SPEND at the Chroma Awards: https://submit.chromaawards.com/watch/18da47b4-4450-4dbd-a390-f7d546d6e7b6
- Cuelist: https://www.cuelist.ai/
- Storybook Studios: https://storybookstudios.ai/

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Source: https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/spend-playground
Era: Late 2026 · Prime Time
Last updated: 2026-11-14