A launch film

01 / What it was

To show what Hermes in Minecraft is, we tried to make a short launch film. It started on 30 Sep as a storyboard of about 74 seconds: a terminal cold open, an island, a song, a day in the life, and a sunset sail.

It went through an animatic, a first film, recordings in the real world, a new storyboard set on a pirate ship, and many review rounds. The builder's rule through all of it: real screens, not fake ones.

02 / How it worked

• A storyboard of 20 panels, then an animatic, then real in-game recordings from early October.
• A song with its own lyrics about too many terminals, made with a music generator.
• In October the plan was rebuilt around seven features: shared terminals, Claude Code and Hermes, clickable web pages up close and from a distance, persistence, one-prompt building, a place for every part of your work, and a daily routine.
• Ship shots first ran at about 3-7 real frames per second, so the plan moved to recording with a replay mod (Flashback, a third-party mod) and rendering the camera path offline.
• Latest main render: 93.5 seconds. A separate 30-second teaser on 21 Oct used only real footage, with no AI face and no voice.

03 / What we saw

Real footage kept beating generated footage. Generated shots were cut from the teaser after checking every frame, and the main film still had open review notes.

04 / Where it led

The film's ship became the pirate ship experiment, and later footage came from live streams instead.

Sources

1. Launch film brief. film brief, 30 Sep 2026 Status: storyboard v1 (step 1 of the build). Target length is about 74 s, 16:9.
2. Session transcript. session transcript, 3-4 Oct 2026 And don't do fake Hermes' screens, you can also show Claude code sometimes etc
3. Session transcript. session transcript, 3-4 Oct 2026 that's my main thing I want to see the REAL stuff now not fluff
4. Director notes for the recording rig. director notes, 9 Oct 2026 So the ship takes run at about 3-7 real fps inside a 60 fps file.
5. Teaser status notes. teaser status, 21 Oct 2026 All montage footage is real, at real speed, with a light grade only.