25 June 20254:29794 views on YouTubeWatch on YouTube
This is the finished piece that the self-imposed rules were made for: one eFoil battery of footage, four days in post, and no generative AI anywhere in the pipeline. Everything in it was built the old way, in After Effects, Maya and Photoshop, by someone returning to visual effects work after years of running companies instead of making things.
Auto Roto changed the hardest job in the pipeline
The single biggest saving came from After Effects’ Auto Roto. Pulling a clean matte off an organic, moving background used to be a genuine ordeal, which is the entire reason chroma keys exist. Here it isolated a rider on moving water with minimal cleanup afterwards, and the verdict given is that the tool is now good enough to make green screens close to irrelevant for this kind of shot. If you have avoided compositing your own riding footage because you assumed you would have to key it, that assumption is out of date.
The parts that actually cost the four days
Two things ate the schedule. The first was colour matching CG against real world footage, a job that always takes longer than remembered. The second, and the one described as the real battle, was shot alignment: four outfits had to blend across a cut and look like one continuous piece rather than four takes stitched together. The honest note attached to the whole thing is that a road cutting through surreal space was probably too ambitious for the time available, and would have wanted another two days to dial in properly.
Shooting to a battery budget
The one battery rule is not a gimmick, it is a shot list discipline, and it came close to the wire. Eighty five percent of the pack was gone before the final runs in wetsuit-only mode even started, and the last shot landed with fifteen percent remaining. That is worth thinking about if you shoot your own riding: the constraint forces you to decide what the film needs before you get on the water, rather than discovering it while you burn range.
The track underneath it
The edit runs to Specific Ambiguity’s remix of “Every Day Is Exactly the Same”, which sets the tone the visuals are working towards. The episode also carries a plainly stated ask, that the channel was sitting at nine hundred subscribers and needed a thousand to monetise.
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