Church Hurt — AI Film Campaign

[ THE CONCEPT ]

From fracture to final frame

Epic Church came to us wanting a Netflix-style series — cinematic, prestige, made to be binged — to open a hard conversation: the hurt that can come from something as beautiful as the Church.

We explored several directions before one held it all at once. Stained glass. Radiant when whole — yet scored, snapped and sharp the instant it breaks. Beauty and danger sealed in the same pane; the wound and the light, inseparable.

That became the metaphor for the entire series.

01CONCEPT // POSITIONING

Pitching the series

We didn't open with one safe layout — we pitched a whole field of directions. Grunge tally-marks for the seven churches. A roman-numeral "VII." Scripture-and-static collages. Bold lockups with the word HURT quietly bandaged. A risograph newspaper headline. Every option below was put on the table before we converged on the fractured stained-glass world.

Church Hurt seven-poster series direction

06 · Compact mark

09 · Textured fill

Eleven directions pitched — click any to enlarge. The stained-glass poster world (01) became the campaign.

02SCRIPT // EDITOR BRIEF

Developing the script

The film was written to a strict 40–46 second cut, structured around an emotional arc: Connect → Tension → Answer → Reveal. Voiceover and on-screen text were timed line by line, then translated into a nine-shot "zoom map" — a single window travelled from 800% to 100% so the pull-back feels invisible until the picture suddenly makes sense.

Handwritten Church Hurt voiceover script in a notebook, with cross-outs, doodles of a stained-glass window and a cross — Where it started — the voiceover, drafted by hand before it was timed and boarded: “Stories of hope. Stories of hurt… true stories from the seven churches in Revelation — Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea… Reignite the flame. Rediscover the hope. Reengage your faith. And overcome — Church Hurt.”

Shot	Timing	Type	What the audience sees
01	0:00–0:05	VO	Abstract cobalt-blue close-up — zero recognition. "There are wounds that don't make sense…"
02	0:06–0:10	Text	The crack appears near the steeple — the first clue. "…because they happened in a holy place."
03	0:11–0:16	Text	Five rapid cuts across the church panels: Forgotten. Betrayed. Burned. Silenced. Empty.
04	0:17–0:22	VO	Light pulses through the crack like a heartbeat. "God has never ignored it."
05	0:23–0:28	VO	Pull-back begins — Jesus' hands, then His silhouette, come into view.
06	0:29–0:33	Text	Steeple + crack in the same frame — the visual thesis. "He's not done speaking."
07	0:34–0:38	Text	Near-full window. The climactic hold. "What if the wound is the beginning of the message?"
08	0:39–0:43	Title	Full reveal, edge to edge. CHURCH HURT burns in over the glass.
09	0:43–0:46	Text	Fade to black. "A new series. Epic Church."

03HIGGSFIELD // MIDJOURNEY

Image development

A master frame was generated in Midjourney, then hundreds of variations were explored in Higgsfield — hunting for the exact window: the right lead-lines, the fracture in the right place, and light that reads like the only living thing in the frame. Every shot in the final film is a crop of one hero image.

Higgsfield stained glass exploration grid 1

Higgsfield cathedral interior exploration grid

Higgsfield stained glass exploration grid 3

Selects from the image-generation exploration inside Higgsfield.

04ART DIRECTION

Revelation 2:1 stained glass frame — Scripture frame — Revelation 2:1, the spine of the series.

Locking the visual language

With the hero image chosen, we set the grade and rules the whole campaign would obey: desaturated glass pushed toward deep cobalt and crimson, shadows crushed to near-black, and the warm light through the crack kept as the single most saturated element on screen.

The key art — Christ in the glass, the wordmark fractured around Him — became the anchor everything else pointed back to.

05CLAUDE // GEMINI

Storyboarding

The narrative and shot logic were developed with Claude and Gemini, then boarded on an infinite canvas — sequencing the beats of an artisan restoring a broken window as a visual metaphor for the series itself. This is where timing, camera intent and emotional pacing were pressure-tested before a single frame was animated.

Storyboard sequence of the stained glass restoration — Storyboard beats — the craftsman-and-glass metaphor, boarded frame by frame.

06SEEDANCE

Scene & camera building

Seedance was used to translate stills into motion — testing camera moves, parallax and the physics of light through glass, and building alternate scenes and angles to find the exact drift and pull-back the edit needed.

07LUMA

Directing the film

Luma became the director's chair — a dashboard for orchestrating shots, iterating on motion, and assembling the sequence into a coherent piece. Below is a behind-the-scenes look at the actual workflow: managing generations, comparing takes and shaping the final pull-back.

Luma Labs directing dashboard behind the scenes

08SUNO // ELEVENLABS

Sound, score & voice

A film like this lives or dies on its audio. The final piece isn't one track — it's a stack of layers, each developed and iterated in its own tool: a moody cinematic score under a warm, human voiceover, sitting beneath the picture and the sound design.

Suno song editor timeline building the Church Hurt soundtrack — The score assembled in Suno's timeline — sections, fades and layers shaped to breathe with the pull-back.

The score — built in Suno

The underscore — "a moody cinematic underscore built on distant…" — was composed and arranged in Suno, then edited on the timeline with fades and section changes so the music swells into the reveal and drops into near-silence when the film needs stillness.

Crucially, this wasn't one lucky generation. We developed many songs and multiple versions, auditioning tone after tone — tempo, instrumentation, how much space to leave — until one arrangement let the silence do its work and the title land.

ElevenLabs text to speech, Church Hurt voiceover script and voice settings — The voiceover — written as a script and performed by an AI voice, tuned for a warm, grounded read.

The voice — scripted & voiced in ElevenLabs

The voiceover was both written and performed through ElevenLabs. A warm, grandfatherly read (Eleven Turbo v2, tuned for stability and pace) carries the Revelation script — naming the seven churches one by one, then turning: "Reignite the flame. Rediscover the hope. Reengage your faith. And overcome — Church Hurt."

Voice, speed, stability and style were dialled in until the delivery felt human and pastoral rather than generated — the difference between a read and a message.

[ WHY THE LAYERS MATTER ]

Score, voiceover, sound design and picture were built as separate stems and stacked — so each could be tuned without disturbing the others. That separation is exactly what makes the finished cut feel composed, not generated: the music can breathe, the voice can sit forward, and the silence around the reveal is deliberate. Layers are the craft.

09THE FINAL PRODUCT

The delivered campaign

One concept, delivered as ready-to-run assets — two service-opener bumpers, each cut to drop straight into a Sunday gathering: one carrying the full voiceover, one stripped to a minimal, wordless ending.

Church Hurt service bumper with voiceover

[ THE PIPELINE ]

One workflow, eight tools

When we built this — over six months ago — no single model could do it. Getting here meant orchestrating eight specialised tools into one directed pipeline, each doing the job it did best.

Today, some models are starting to do all of this on their own. And that's exactly the point: our workflow keeps evolving and innovating as fast as the tools do — always reaching for whatever serves the story best.

Midjourney

Master image

The single hero stained-glass frame the whole film is built from.

Higgsfield

Image exploration

Hundreds of variations to find the exact window, fracture and light.

Claude

Concept & script

Narrative logic, script structure and storyboard sequencing.

Gemini

Board & ideation

Visual ideation and storyboard development alongside Claude.

Seedance

Motion & camera

Stills into motion — camera moves, parallax and scene building.

Luma

Direction & assembly

The director's dashboard — orchestrating and assembling the cut.

Suno

Score

The moody cinematic underscore — many songs and versions, one final arrangement.

ElevenLabs

Voice

The voiceover — scripted and performed as a warm, human read.

[ THE OUTCOME ]

Cinema-grade, church-speed

A campaign that would traditionally demand a location shoot, a stained-glass build, talent, a composer and a motion-graphics team was concepted, designed, scored, voiced and directed in days — from a single generated image.

More importantly, it holds emotional weight. The reveal earns its title card. And it gives Epic Church ready-to-run launch assets — plus a reusable series identity — that punch far above their production footprint.

Stained glass detail — colour returning on the full reveal — The earned reveal — jewel-tone colour returning as the picture snaps into focus.

ChurchHurt

From fracture to final frame

Pitching the series

Developing the script

Image development

Locking the visual language

Storyboarding

Scene & camera building

Directing the film

Sound, score & voice

The score — built in Suno

The voice — scripted & voiced in ElevenLabs

The delivered campaign

One workflow, eight tools

Cinema-grade, church-speed

Have a series
to launch?

From fracture to final frame

Pitching the series

Developing the script

Image development

Locking the visual language

Storyboarding

Scene & camera building

Directing the film

Sound, score & voice

The score — built in Suno

The voice — scripted & voiced in ElevenLabs

The delivered campaign

One workflow, eight tools

Cinema-grade, church-speed

Have a seriesto launch?

Have a series
to launch?