The land creates the project.
WADI is a 90-second brand film for a coastal masterplan development in Abu Dhabi, built shot by shot in AI, delivered and handed over. This page is the making-of: the rejected shots and the rules that came out of them.
The idea
The film never presents the masterplan. It discovers it. Four acts across ninety seconds: origin, formation, experience, return. Dry earth cracks, water fills the cracks, rock rises into buildings, life arrives.
The payoff is the kind of device a film team lives for: the crack pattern that forms in the earth in act one is the masterplan's actual footprint, revealed at the end. The form was in the geology before anything was built.
The film's arc, in six frames
Key shots from the four acts: origin, formation, experience, return.
Build the world before animating
Forty-seven reference sheets were locked before a single frame of motion: environments, characters, props, each one a multi-view identity lock on a neutral grey backdrop with pinned palette, sun angle, and constraints.
This is why the blueprint images look flat and grey while the film looks cinematic. The sheets are deliberately kept in a neutral studio register. They are the continuity contract, not the look. The look comes later, carried by color-locked start frames.
The continuity contract
Two of the forty-seven locked sheets. Deliberately flat and neutral: these hold identity, not mood.
Trust the physics
The opening shot is top-down cracks forming the masterplan's shape. The first attempt took a real photo of cracked earth and physically warped the cracks into the masterplan outline, then animated it. Rejected flat: forced geometry reads as fake, and everyone could feel it.
The fix was a different principle, not more polish. Lock two approved end-state stills, the dry cracked earth and the water-filled version, and let the model interpolate the fracture path between them. Stop forcing the geometry. Let the physics find it. The cracks finally looked like the earth had made them, because in every way that matters, it had.
Let the earth make the cracks
The locked end states. The model interpolates the fracture path between them, so the geometry is found, not forced.
AI over-indexes on evocative words. Specificity wins.
Precision beats poetry
The phrase tapered tower-mass produced smooth pyramids, twice. The fix was to throw out our own evocative language and rewrite prompts in the architect's actual vocabulary: five-to-seven-storey curved sandstone mid-rise, sediment-band striations, curved balcony ribbons, sky-bridges. The pyramids disappeared.
The project's bible carries twenty-four hard rules in the same spirit: no glass curtain walls, canal water never saturated blue, rocks emerge at literal building scale because the rocks are the buildings. Client corrections became law, once, and stayed fixed.
Eight feedback rounds in one night
The approval deck went from version three to version four point eight in a single night of client rounds, every annotation preserved. That cadence is the point of working this way: a note arrives, the affected shots regenerate, the deck updates, and no one waits for a re-shoot that costs a week.
Where it stands
The client has the finished film. The public cut will land at the top of this page once it is cleared for web.
Until then, the making-of is the story: the locked world, the rejected shots, and the rulebook that got a piece of geology to design a masterplan.
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