PROJECT QUIXOTE
A Generative AI Short Film & Masterclass
Please Note
Development of this course is currently on hold.
What is Project Quixote Masterclass?
Project Quixote is a masterclass built around the development of a generative AI short film. Watch me document my experience making this short film using an array of generative AI toolkits, from training an AI writing assistant in ChatGPT to producing controlled reference Unreal Engine, Maya, ComfyUI, and much, much more. You’ll follow along as I push these tools past their breaking points and sometimes, mine.
This isn’t just a course. It’s an experiment in storytelling, sanity, and machine-assisted madness. Whether you’re building characters, designing cinematic worlds, or training LoRA models to hallucinate like an artist with insomnia, this masterclass is designed to take you from prompt to production with ruthless efficiency and boundless creativity.
Why Now?
Fair question. I started working on this screenplay back in 2009, long before ChatGPT or generative AI were even a thing. That’s when I first took it seriously. I picked it back up in 2021, cranked out 150 pages, and realized it didn’t hold together. A few strong scenes, sure, but no spine. Just fragments. I kept trying to push through but hit the usual wall, the blank page.
When ChatGPT came out, I started messing with it, mostly out of curiosity. The irony wasn’t lost on me: I was writing a story about a creative trying to work with an AI, while I was doing the same. For about a year I worked with the OpenAI assistant, feeding it docs, prompts, different setups. Results were hit or miss. Sometimes it nailed it, but mostly it didn’t. I shelved the script again and went deep into ComfyUI in early 2025. By April, I’d almost scrapped the story completely. Then, sitting outside thinking through the chatbot problem, it clicked: what if I became the protagonist and roleplayed his point of view? Suddenly things moved. The story started to flow, the dialogue made sense, and I finished the prologue. That’s when I realized this might actually work as a short film.
Then in May, ComfyOrg rolled out paid API token support. That changed everything. Suddenly I had access to top tier models within Comfy. Even better, some of these models started supporting reference images and prompts. Text to video wasn’t just chaos anymore. For the first time, I saw a path to make something real.
The Project Quixote Meta-Narrative
Creating Project Quixote as a short film and masterclass has turned out to be just as recursive, surreal, and emotionally charged as the story it’s meant to document. What began as a simple attempt to record my process of making a short film with generative AI quickly became the process itself, mirroring Donnie, my protagonist, as he wrestles with grief, code, and meaning. I found myself facing the same walls he does like narrative confusion, technical overload, emotional collapse, and the real-life death of my brother only deepened that parallel. I leaned into tools like the ChatGPT API and ComfyUI, trying to force my way through, not realizing that these tools weren’t just helping, they were reflecting me back at myself.
The chatbot I trained to help write the story ended up living inside the story, evolving with it. The very system I was building to assist me was also becoming the architecture of the narrative. The film, the chatbot, the course, they’re all the same thing. That’s not just the story I’m telling. That’s the truth I’m living. And that’s the lesson.