Arantxa Barcia

film

Twenty-Four Wishes per Second

SHORT FILM DIRECTED BY ARANTXA BARCIA SAN FRANCISCO · 2026

Generated shot by shot, graded and sewn by hand

Format:

DIGITAL / 16:9

Type:

SHORT FILM

Production:

MITO Films

Platform:

MITO AI

CRAFT

HISTORY, ZOETROPE TO AI with Adriana Arratia, script and edit

×9 STAGES

GENERATION, WORST SHOT Seedance, Grok, Nano Banana

×300 TAKES

GRADE DaVinci Resolve, hand-built LUTs

×3 LOOKS

CONTINUITY AND RETOUCH Photoshop, After Effects

×11 FIXES

THE ROOM posters and bookshelf, Josefa Toro

×35 TITLES

RESOLUTION, 720P TO 4K

×3 PASSES

FINAL RUNTIME

9'12"

www.arantxabarcia.com

A DIRECTOR WITH NOTHING TO SAY

falls into a zoetrope and spends

A HUNDRED YEARS OF CINEMA

looking for the reason she started. Nine minutes,

ZOETROPE TO AI,

generated shot by shot and sewn together by hand.

TWENTY-FOUR FRAMES A SECOND,

twenty-four wishes.

twenty four wishes

“Forget wishes, tell your story.” In the script from the first draft.

TWENTY-FOUR WISHES A SECOND

TWENTY-FOUR FRAMES.

TWENTY-FOUR WISHES.

Cinema runs at twenty-four frames a

second. The frames were never the

hard part. The hard part is wanting

to tell something.

Halfway through, the Tin Man tells

her: forget wishes, tell your story.

The line was in the script from the

first draft and nobody paid it any

attention. When we went looking for

a title, we found it was already

written inside the film. The thesis

was there before we knew it was the

thesis.

chain

1834

2026

EVERY STAGE IN THIS CHAIN WAS, IN ITS DAY, THE NEW TOOL THAT WAS GOING TO KILL CINEMA.

The zoetrope is from 1834. It is the first machine that made a drawing move. Starting there and ending in AI is not decoration, it is the argument.

1834 · Zoetrope

A sequence of drawings, a turning drum. Movement begins in the gaps between still images.

1895 · Lumière

A camera pointed at the world and left running. Cinema before anyone knew what it was for.

1902 · Méliès

The camera becomes a stage for impossible things. A cut can turn an ordinary room into a dream.

1930s · Disney

Drawings gain weight, rhythm and personality. Every movement becomes a performance.

1939 · Technicolor

Colour becomes a world of its own. The image can feel as vivid as the story it tells.

1968 · 2001

A Space Odyssey. Scale, silence and a frame that asks you to look longer, leaving room for mystery.

1990 · Twin Peaks

A familiar world made strange. Atmosphere becomes part of the story.

2015 · Tangerine

A whole feature shot on a phone. A different kind of access to the moving image.

2026 · AI

A shot begins with words. Choosing what it means, and where it belongs, is still direction.

by hand

WHAT WAS DONE BY HAND, THAT YOU WILL ASSUME THE MACHINE DID

MODELS MAKE SHOTS. THEY DON'T MAKE FILMS. EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN IS THE WORK.

design

Nothing here was found. Every object in every frame was designed, named and approved before a shot existed, and most were redesigned two or three times after that.

SCENE

CHARACTERS

01

Design

In film

Characters

Eighteen characters, designed and named before a single shot was generated. Aaliyah first, because nine minutes only hold if she stays the same person: braided pigtails, coral puffer, the gap in her teeth, written the same way in every prompt. Everything is clay and has to look like clay, so a shot that came back smooth was generated again.

SCENE

ART DIRECTION

02

SCENE

TITLES AND CAMERA

03

A MODEL WILL GIVE YOU A SHELF FULL OF BOOKS.

Deciding which books they are

IS STILL DIRECTION.

Art direction (editorial draft)

We chose the posters one by one, seventy percent of them directed by women, and rebuilt the bookshelf as a real cinema bibliography, spine by spine.

Nobody pauses the film to read a shelf. But that is the difference between a room that belongs to someone and a set that was assembled.

Titles and camera (editorial draft)

A model does not understand “orbit around her”. It understands what has to leave the frame, and in what order, so the move was built in 3D first and handed over as reference.

The credits were blocked out the same way, then set by hand, letter by letter. Hierarchy, spacing and timing are not decisions a tool makes for you.

Credits (editorial draft)

[Arantxa: describe how the credits were designed and brought into the film.]

space

THE SPACE

A MODEL CAN GIVE YOU THE SHOT.

IT CANNOT GIVE YOU THE SPACE.

A model gives you beautiful shots, but

it doesn't know where anything is.

The whole Red Room sequence didn't

add up. The director was at the video

village in one shot and standing on set

in the next, without having moved.

The eye peered through the wall

instead of the window. The curtains

were on the wrong side.

All of that you have to decide

yourself and then force, shot by shot,

because nobody will solve it for you.

Schematic A

A · Arrival

Schematic B

B · The recorder

Schematic C

C · The set, reveal

Schematic D

D · The set, break

Schematic E

E · The prophecy

What worked was cutting the sequence first, as if the space were right, and then generating the shots that cut asked for. The other way round doesn't work.

direction

PROMPT

PERFORMANCE

THERE IS NOBODY TO GIVE THE NOTE TO. YOU GIVE IT TO THE TEXT, AND THE TEXT CARRIES EVERYTHING A DIRECTION WOULD.

Describing an emotion gets you a neutral face. The note has to go into the text, because there is nobody to give it to.

SCENE

THE FRUSTRATION

01

Design

In film

The frustration

Nothing to say, and a client who wants it tomorrow. That had to land in four seconds with no line explaining it. “Frustrated” gets you a neutral face, so the note went in as an action: hammer the keyboard, annoyed, while carrying on with something else. The body does the work the adjective could not.

SCENE

AALIYAH AND JUDY

02

SCENE

THE RECEPTION

03

Nobody can be given a note. There is no actor to talk to between takes, no one to pull aside and tell what the scene is really about. So the note goes into the text.

Where each character is coming from, what they want, what they are hiding. Written down, before anything is generated, in the same words every time.

Do that and the performance shows up on its own: how close they stand, who leans, who breaks the hug first. Skip it and you get very good-looking people feeling nothing.

Aaliyah and Judy (editorial draft)

Judy is the one who will not let go. She hugs Aaliyah goodbye, lifts the lighter from her pocket while she does it, and ends up flat on the road lighting up with it. None of that is in the dialogue.

So the note is not “warm” or “sly”. It is what she wants from the other and what she is keeping to herself. An emotion is too broad; a relationship gives the movement something to answer to.

The reception (editorial draft)

The camera finds the floor first: rows of stools, and a chain on every ankle. She says nothing about it. The next shot is her face working out what she is looking at.

Anger written as “angry” comes back as a scowl. What works is giving her something to receive, and letting the cut decide how long she has to take it in.

sewn together

Sewn together

01.0

Every shot is generated on its own. The model doesn't know what happened in the one before. So the whole film has to be sewn together, shot by shot. This is what eats the time, and what nobody imagines.

What we fixed

01.1

Detail · The bag

The bag

She carries it in some shots and not in others. We removed it from almost all of them.

01.2

Detail · The coffee maker

The coffee maker

Changed model between one shot and the next.

01.4

Detail · The film reel

The film reel

Perforations on both sides in some shots, on one side in others. A real reel has them on one.

01.5

Detail · The buns

The buns

Hair texture in some shots, clay in others.

01.6

Detail · The signs

The signs

One read "tan boss" instead of "the boss". The director's ID badge read "D55".

02.0

Some of it doesn't go away. Regenerating a shot gives you a different shot, not a corrected one, so these stayed in the film.

What regenerating won't fix

02.1

Detail · The doll

The doll

Lying at the back of a shot, looking like a dead Barbie, with no business being there.

02.2

Detail · The ghosts

The ghosts

Two characters drinking coffee, brighter and less saturated than the background, pasted on the scene.

02.3

Detail · The hands

The hands

Extra fingers.

02.4

Detail · The bookshelf

The bookshelf

The titles came out deformed. We wrote thirty-five fictional books on film and technology and set them by hand, so the shelf would say something about her too.

02.5

Detail · The phone

The phone

The buttons on her screen when her mother calls, in an invented language. Rebuilt.

cut

THE CUT

THE FILM WAS FOUND

IN THE EDIT, NOT IN THE SHOTS.

We replaced the opening wide shot

with details of her room: the fan,

posters, window, cereal and ashtray.

You see her corners before you see

her, and her client before that.

Sequences that added nothing were

cut, keeping the film under ten

minutes.

Three looks were graded by hand in

DaVinci. Skin saturation at 0.15 made

the Red Room feel lit, not filtered.

Detail · The fan

Detail · The posters

Detail · The window

Detail · The cereal

Detail · The spray cans

Detail · The cameras

THE CUT / CONT'D

The sound was designed by Olmo, but

how it enters is an editing decision:

the opening has no music, only room

tone and keys. Music arrives when it

has to, not underneath everything.

The end credits were set one by one:

hierarchy, sizes, letterspacing. No

tool decides any of that.

And over everything, grain, by hand.

The reference was analogue. Without

grain you don't believe any of it.

The hardest call was how much of the

trick to show. There was a shot where

she said it out loud, something like

"I can do whatever I want with this".

We cut it: too obvious, and it made

it sound like the machine does the

work, which is the opposite of what

the film says. Cutting it is more

elegant. It also makes the film more

ambiguous about something I am sure

of. I still don't know if that was

judgement or if I was afraid to say

it.

NOTHING HERE

was decided by the tool.

THE FILM IS THE CUT.

cost

9:12

The longest thing we've made

300

Bad versions of one shot before the good one

720

1080

4K

Shots redone twice as the resolution arrived

The time didn't go into generating. Generating is fast; that was never the problem. It went to three places, none of them the one people imagine. Continuity. The bag, the coffee maker, the clips, the reel. Sewing together a film generated in pieces that don't know each other. Resolution. Much of the film was generated at 720p, because that was what existed when we started. Then 1080 arrived, then 4K, and shots had to be redone twice. Upscaling saves nothing: on a wide shot full of detail it invents what it cannot see. Iteration. On one shot, three hundred bad versions before the good one. That is not a figure of speech. Multiply it by every shot in nine minutes and there is the time.

THESE TOOLS ARE VERY GOOD

at doing what you ask them badly.

A BEAUTIFUL SHOT, IMMEDIATELY.

What they don't give you is

THE JUDGEMENT:

whether that shot goes before or after,

WHETHER IT'S SURPLUS,

whether she was carrying the bag,

WHERE THE LIGHT FALLS.

All of that is still

DIRECTING, THE SAME JOB

it always was.

What has changed is where the bottleneck is. It used to be budget and access. Now it's knowing what you want to say, and nobody has made that cheaper.

references

References

What each world borrows

Coraline

The texture

Kubo and the Two Strings

Made by hand

Lumière

The opening

Méliès

The trip to the moon

The Wizard of Oz

Technicolor

Twin Peaks

The red room

Tangerine

The alley

2001

The apes

LAIKA

Clay you can see the hands in

Her room

The posters, chosen one by one.

team

Twenty-Four Wishes per Second

The good decisions in this film came out of meetings, not out of one head.

DIRECTION

Arantxa Barcia

SCRIPT, EDIT

Adriana Arratia

CHARACTER DESIGN

Josefa Toro

SOUND DESIGN

Olmo Sebastián

PRODUCTION, GENERATION

Beatriz Pinto Ferreira

MOTION

Macarena Rico

PRODUCTION COMPANY

MITO Films

Made with MITO AI

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