Scripted / Series

Sleeping Ugly

ROLE	WRITER / DIRECTOR / EDITOR
CATEGORY	SCRIPTED

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Sleeping Ugly chronicles the fracturing life of fifteen-year-old Riley Basille, whose reality begins to glitch and dissolve due to the onset of a severe neurological condition causing her to have persistent episodes of hypersomnia, hallucinations, and an inability to distinguish reality from her dreams and delusions. Based on the novel by PE Rowe, lives at the intersection of intimate, character-driven realism and mythic, symbolic adventure—where the dreamworld isn't escapism, but a narrative translation of Riley's inner life…

We filmed a proof-of-concept of the VFX portions of the pilot episode. These VFX breakdowns are found below.

VFX APPROACH

Photorealistic anthropomorphic animals have traditionally been among the most technically demanding forms of visual effects, requiring large teams of specialized artists and complex pipelines for creature modeling, anatomical rigging, muscle and skin simulation, fur grooming, facial animation, performance translation, lighting, rendering, and compositing.

Productions such as The Jungle Book (~$15K–$25K/sec of animal VFX), War for the Planet of the Apes (~$18K–$24K/sec; $150–200M budget went to VFX), The Lion King ($900K–$1.8M/min), and Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle ($480K–$1.08M/min) relied on major VFX houses including MPC, Wētā FX, and Framestore, often across hundreds or thousands of effects shots. Individual creatures can contain millions—or in Kong's case, tens of millions—of simulated hairs, while The Jungle Book reported some frames taking 30–40 hours to render; even when actors provide motion-capture performances, teams of animators traditionally must painstakingly reinterpret those performances onto anatomically different animal characters. The combination of specialized labor, custom technology, enormous rendering requirements, and extensive post-production has historically made convincing, emotionally expressive photoreal animals a capability associated with major studio productions rather than independent filmmaking.

For our production of SLEEPING UGLY, we got overall costs (including all production expenses and VFX) to $715/minute — AI-based performance-capture tools fundamentally changed that equation. We were able to create the project for approximately $10,000, while shooting the actors together on location, without green screens, motion-capture suits, or other equipment interfering with their performances—allowing us to approach the scenes like a conventional live-action film first and translate those performances into the animal characters afterward. We blended practical effects with a real taxidermy bear for lighting, scale, and texture reference.