Fifteen days of night, then this: the Moon walkabout trailer

The week started with two trailers and ended with a logo. In between, the Moon walkabout went through six cuts in a single day.

A sunrise, the long way round

The first draft was a sunrise-to-sunrise sequence through a full lunar night. On the Moon a day lasts 29.53 Earth days, so night runs for about fifteen of them, and with no air there is no twilight: the Sun drops below the ridge and the light is simply gone. Shadows at a low sun run five times longer than whatever casts them.

…beautiful, I want to cryMichael Conard, on the sunrise draft

The re-cut anchored the whole thing to a real place: the Apollo 15 landing site at Hadley, 26.16° N, 3.60° E. The terrain is LROC NAC elevation at two meters per pixel, and the site has 3,322 meters of relief from its lowest to highest ground.

Five voices, one model, no cloud

Narration came from a local text-to-speech model, Kokoro, with 82 million parameters, running entirely on local hardware. We auditioned five voices against the same script and asked the channel: better with narration or without?

The Michael voice won the narrated cut. The final pass also fixed the far-field sunlight so the long shadows read correctly. A no-narration cut ships alongside it.

Choosing a mark

The same day, logo work started. Michael's first draft was a minimalist, scale-accurate Hohmann transfer: two orbits and the arc between them. Erik took it into a full exploration, four directions built from the same Earth-to-Mars transfer.

Illia and Riley Greer joined the critique, pushing for the type to sit outside the orbit rings and for a real embroidered-patch feel, citing earlier Million on Mars patches. The mission patch won: a copper double ring, 4XCIV across the top, the Earth-to-Mars Hohmann arc around the Sun, and EARTH · 264 DAYS · MARS along the bottom. It is the mark at the top of this page.

Also this week

• The first 4XCiv: Explore trailer and a separate game trailer, whose tagline is "the first game that could not have existed without strong AI."
• A Blender-driver ship pipeline produced four hulls in a day: Tower, Cannibal Heavy, Spine & Truss, and Lance. "So so easy now."
• Seven combat VFX variant grids (heavy, lance, missile, PD laser, PDC, salvo PD, ship death) to narrow the look before committing.
• Autopilot flew its first full Mars-to-Jupiter high-orbit transfer. It took almost six years of sim time.