What happens when you take a multi-million dollar Hollywood car chase and try to recreate it with an iPhone?
That's exactly what VP Land, in collaboration with VPX Lab, set out to test using Beeble's AI tools within a hybrid filmmaking workflow. Not in theory, but in a real-world production: shooting plates, scanning environments, compositing, and pushing footage until it breaks.
The goal was simple: rebuild a sequence inspired by One Battle After Another using accessible tools — iPhone footage, AI relighting, and a hybrid production pipeline. The bigger question was harder: how far can this stack actually go, and where does it fall apart?
The process combined real-world capture and virtual production techniques. Exterior driving plates were shot on an iPhone, supported by 360-degree reference footage. Interior shots pushed further, testing both a traditional "poor man's process" (real car + blue screen) and a fully virtual approach, scanning a car into 3D and shooting the actor in an empty space.
Across the workflow, from shooting plates to compositing and relighting, the team ran into the core tension shaping AI filmmaking today: speed versus control. Traditional pipelines offered precision but required time and expertise. Newer AI approaches moved faster, but often broke consistency.
Using Beeble SwitchLight and later Beeble SwitchX, the team began exploring what happens when that gap starts to close: where relighting, restyling, and iteration can happen faster without completely losing control of the image.
This post is a first look at the experiment, a preview of what worked, what didn't, and what it reveals about where AI filmmaking stands right now.
Read the full breakdown in VP Land.