First cut

Two cuts of the same 151 shots, both assembled in DaVinci Resolve. The trailer runs 75 seconds and is cut to music; the full assembly runs 17:51 in script order. Neither is graded or locked — they exist so the material can be watched rather than scrolled.

Trailer 75 SECONDS · 50 CUTS ON THE BEAT

Cut to the music. The bed was analysed for onsets — 92 of them, about 101 BPM — and 49 of the 50 cuts land exactly on a detected beat; the two in the tail sit in the wind by ear because the grid ends there. The brass hit at 55 seconds falls on the hero wide of the craft. Narration is ElevenLabs, sitting in the gaps rather than fighting the percussion, with the music ducked 7.5 dB under each line. Four title cards in Neue Haas Grotesk, IBM Plex Mono and Instrument Serif, animated with fades, opening letter-spacing and a slow push — the opening card types on. Two clipped radio lines are buried under the military section at −19 dB. The clips’ own audio is off entirely.

Full assembly 17:51 · 151 SHOTS · 26 SCENES

151 shots 26 scenes 17:51 runtime 24 fps 1280×720 web copy

What you are watching

Shot order is Bryan's, not Jesse's. The assembly runs in straight chronological story order, A1-01 through A2-64. These are inserts for Jesse's edit to place against narration — the running order here is the script's, not the finished documentary's.
Two engines. 78 shots came from MiniMax H3 fl2va at 8 steps; 73 from the Singularity ref2va fine-tune at 6 steps. The changeover falls at A1-80, part way through The Recovery. Worth watching whether the look holds across that seam.
Hard cuts throughout. No dissolves or fades — scripted fades need Resolve 21.1 and this machine runs 21.0.2.4. Every transition is a straight cut.
Sound is a first pass. On the assembly, six ambience beds sit on their own track, written from the per-scene SOUND (post) notes in Bryan's script: the gate at dawn, the rotor, the dead air inside the craft, the recovery, the town going quiet, and the coda. Everything else is the clips' own generated audio.
A1-12 was relit. Scene 2 is before dawn in the script, but the window was pushing warm afternoon sun brighter than the kerosene lamp — which made the lit lamp illogical. The window is now cold blue pre-dawn and the lamp reads as the motivated source.

Known issues, carried deliberately. Shots A1-01 to A1-27 were rendered before the music fix and have generated music under them; the plan is to replace that in post rather than re-render. A1-28 and A1-29 still carry unintelligible generated speech. Only A1-48 and A1-51 have real dialogue, both written in Bryan's script. Last frames exist for 6 of 151 shots, so most cuts are first-frame conditioned only.