I got the privilege to create and direct a short film at EDGLRD from an idea by filmmaker Harmony Korine. In those first days the talk revolved around one subject, games. Scenes that follow game logic deliberately break the rules of film. We would lean on brand new AI and the power of realtime rendering to capture this feeling. Harmony and creative director Joao Rosa came to me with an idea to create a short that channeled the pulse of Miami street racing with bright lights, tight crowds, and chaotic energy. Unreal Engine was the natural choice to fuse game logic with cinema at 30 frames per second.
Structure mattered. At twelve I watched a teaser for Burnout Paradise that changed the speed of my brain. Calm city b-roll that suddenly cut to cars peeling loose from the grid. I wanted to capture that rhythm, an order that gives way to frenzy. I showed the clip to the team and went to work on the first cut.
The film opens on a dark city with a crowd packed shoulder to shoulder, waiting. I used Unreal’s AI to make the crowd act like a real crowd. Bodies turning. Heads tracking headlights. Then a diffusion “entity” moves through the frame, a controlled glitch that pulls us into a duel between two racers. I named it street_v01. The team liked it, but we could feel a gap missing.
Harmony had a persistent idea floating around the studio; leprechauns against the yakuza. It sounded like a riddle at first, but it turned out to be the solution. My dueling racers became a leprechaun woman versus a yakuza man. I painted the city neon red for him and bent the sky green for her. Rainbows and swords as weapons gave the world a charge we had not reached before. The retrofit made the foundation stronger. The streets took the color, the crowd had something to anticipate, and the duel now had a reason to exist that was not just speed.
I kept pushing the frame. 30fps on twos that goes to 60fps when the moment needed it. The crowd sim grew until the sidewalks looked unsafe in the right way. The diffusion pass learned manners. I stabilized it so the swing sat in the highlights and left the shadows clean. Old movies taught me that trick. Grain and details bloom in the bright parts while the darkness stays crisp. It looked like a cousin of Spider-Verse if that cousin had been raised on Miami night air and battery acid. The talented team around me built new toys: dynamic smoke, physics, liquids, particles, and paint that I was able to integrate seamlessly. I named this new film street_v02.
There is a part of my mind that never turns off. It runs in loops. ADHD feels like standing in the center lane while the cars keep coming. Sleep and work blur. Ideas arrive out of order. The chaos is a tool if you hold it by the handle. This project demanded that kind of weather. When street_v02 finally held steady, I could see what I had tried to say at the start. A city waits, a grip on the wheel, and a cut into madness. Two figures who should not meet, locked into a sprint that bends the sky.
The short landed where we wanted it. Harmony took the piece forward with Drain Gang. Bladee and Yung Lean brought their own energy. The collaboration turned into a music video built on the same configuration. EDGLRD and Boiler Room staged it in Miami during Art Basel. The room was restless in the right way. Press covered it and the work traveled.
I am proud of the simple, technical facts. We used game logic to drive narrative. I taught the crowd to act and controlled the chaos when it burst from the calm. At the time, the spectacle and style were like nothing I had seen before. The project outgrew the plan, and my head finally cleared.
JOSEPH CONOVER 