Casinha 83

Casinha 83 began during Felipe’s paternity leave as a small experiment between his newborn son’s naps. What started as a technical study became a personal story about childhood, memory and the experiences he wanted to pass on.

The title refers to lifeguard hut 83 on Atlântida Beach in southern Brazil, a landmark connected to summers, bicycles, friends and the visual world that shaped the film.

The film was built primarily with Midjourney, using designed first and last frames to control each shot. Instead of asking a prompt to invent the scene, Felipe treated prompting as one part of a larger pipeline: visual development, Photoshop adjustments, character blueprints created with Gemini’s Nano Banana, animation between planned frames and a Midjourney moodboard that helped preserve the overall art direction.

Across the production, 1,434 image and video files were generated, while only 24 entered the final film, a selection rate of 1.7%.

That ratio exposed a defining tension in generative production: speed comes from abundance, but authorship still depends on selection, editing and the willingness to discard most of what the tools produce.

The characters were not identical from shot to shot. The goal became visual coherence, recurring colors, proportions and design cues, rather than perfect model-sheet consistency.

Difficult actions and unwanted artifacts were solved through compositing, rotoscoping and frame-by-frame corrections. The project combined generative tools with the same editorial judgement and post-production craft used in traditional animation.

Casinha 83 took an estimated 35 to 40 hours of work. The final decision was to release a film with visible limits instead of continuing to chase a technical perfection that was evolving faster than the production itself.

That choice turned a private experiment into an internationally selected short and a practical study in how generative filmmaking changes a director’s relationship with control, iteration and completion.