HORROR. 12K. 270°." → Inside the AI Pipeline Behind Cosm's Immersive Horror Show

How do you take a horror movie made for a rectangle and fill a 270-degree dome with it? Chadwick Halbritter was show director on Cosm's immersive presentation of Stephen King's It (2017). On this episode of GenTalks, he joins Machine Cinema co-founder Fred Grinstein to talk through the whole path: animation work for Cartoon Network, building 3D and AI pipelines for Samsung and Google with his studio 528 Lab, and the single AI-generated shot of Pennywise's mouth that got the rest of the team on board. He also shares the practical side: working locally on sensitive IP, getting a 12K dome to hold up, and the prompt fix he used when an AI video model refused to render blood. CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro: Chadwick Halbritter and Cosm 2:18 From Aqua Teen Hunger Force to a CBS Christmas special 4:55 Coming to AI mid-career: GANs, DALL·E and photo bashing 6:45 Inside 528 Lab: Samsung, Google and a North Face pitch 12:02 The 528 Lab reel 13:06 The "red pill" moment and the mythology series 18:22 The early work that got him the call 18:55 Becoming show director on a dome experience 21:13 The pipeline: 3D, ComfyUI, Seedance and the dome's CAD model 22:01 What Cosm is, for anyone who hasn't been 23:12 270 degrees: designing past the rectangle 24:20 Working locally on sensitive IP, and the cherry Kool-Aid trick 25:18 The Pennywise mouth shot that won over the room 27:08 Designing fear you feel, not just see 28:31 What's next: holographic work in Seoul and a smart city in Incheon 31:07 Tentacles, floating objects and fast iteration 34:00 Wrap-up KEY TAKEAWAYS - "Work with what you know." Chadwick came to AI with 15 years of directing, 3D and VFX, and wrote prompts the way he already wrote decks and briefed teams. - AI images are the new photo bashing: pulling elements together into a frame to pitch an idea, only much faster. - The breakthrough shot: no frame in the film shows Pennywise's mouth head-on, so he generated one, opened the mouth wider and wider, animated it in Kling 3.0 and composited it in After Effects. Once the stakeholders saw it, requests for more AI work followed. - When Seedance blocked "blood," writing "cherry Kool-Aid" in the prompt gave him the look he needed. - Because the IP was sensitive, the work ran on local GPUs rather than cloud platforms. - A 12K dome shows every flaw. Lo-fi graphics break, and upscaling (including Topaz) is close to being good enough for this format, but not quite there yet. - A traditional VFX pipeline took about seven months for this project. Chadwick sees AI speeding up how quickly ideas like these can be visualized and approved. TOOLS MENTIONED DALL·E · Midjourney · Runway Gen-2 · Pika · Luma · Cinema 4D · Octane · ComfyUI · FLUX · Seedance · Kling 3.0 · After Effects · Flame · Topaz FIND CHADWICK Instagram: instagram.com/ckhmod/ 528 Lab: youtube.com/watch?v=OBWka6czAFk LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chadwickhalbritter/ ABOUT GENTALKS GenTalks is Machine Cinema's conversation series with the artists, technologists and producers building with generative AI in film and media. Hosted by Fred Grinstein. Join the Machine Cinema community: hub.machinecinema.ai #GenTalks #MachineCinema #AIFilmmaking #ImmersiveExperience #Cosm #HorrorFilm #GenerativeAI #Kling #Seedance #ComfyUI