A feature film, made in the open
The Narrow Path We Tread
As automation collapses the global economy, an AI pioneer who walked away from fame — and the machine he raised to love him — must rebuild the economic floor before Moloch, humanity's oldest enemy, seizes an unaligned AI and takes it all.
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This is where The Narrow Path We Tread gets made, in the open. The whole film already exists as a spoken read-through you can play right now, with no account. The script underneath it is open to anyone who wants to make it better.
Most futures are bad ones. Far more paths lead somewhere nobody would choose, or to nobody at all, than lead somewhere worth living in. That is an argument for precision, not for despair. A narrow path is still a path, and it gets walked one specific decision at a time. This film tries to draw those decisions clearly enough to be worth arguing with.
I'm Greg Stevenson, and I'm building it mostly alone, with a pipeline I wrote myself. It was entered in the Future Vision XPRIZE and did not make the final sixty-five. It is being made anyway, as a feature. A story arguing that ownership should be shared should not stay the property of one person, and that is why the script is open.
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Each beat is a single-frame image-to-video (Veo 3.1, 8s), chained — every shot seeded from the previous shot's last frame, so the crate and robot stay consistent.
- Reveal — the man releases the latch; the full front door swings open, revealing the robot curled inside.
- Power-up — he presses a button on its head; a blue light wakes behind the visor; fingers twitch.
- Stand — the robot uncurls and rises to standing; the man steps back.
- Listen — it turns its visor to him and speaks; he listens.
- Comply — only then does he lean in and look into its eye; it authenticates him.
“Hello, I'm in setup mode. If I am to assist you please look into my eyes so that I can authenticate you.” — a flat, factory-default synth voice; it earns a real voice only after it authenticates you.
Episodes
Building this film in public — the failures as well as the wins. Play the series here, or open any episode on YouTube.
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Reveal Future Vision XPRIZE — Prime1 Embodiment Reveal (WIP)
Work-in-progress scene from a Future Vision XPRIZE entry: the arrival and first boot of an embodied AI (Prime1). Reveal → power-up → stand → factory setup-mode authentication. #FutureVisionXPRIZE
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Ep 1 He's right. And we knew. 2026-07-13
A fellow competitor asked why our main character's glasses change three times in forty seconds.
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Ep 2 The score was 0.32. 2026-07-14
Last episode we promised you the day the math told us our approved character was secretly two different men. This is that day.
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Ep 3 Every shot passed. The scene failed. 2026-07-16
Eight shots. Each one reviewed on its own: style, identity, framing. Eight green lights.
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Ep 4 This man does not exist. Refused anyway. 2026-07-17
Nobody in our film exists. Every face is synthetic — no actors, no real people. One video engine refused to even look at them: its moderation fires on ANY photoreal human face, real or synthetic.
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Ep 5 Our AI reviewer called this robot a cow. 2026-07-18
This is Prime One — a robot, and a main character in our film. An AI reviewer we pay to check our footage looked at his reference image and reported, twice: "Subject is a cow."
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Ep 6 Our own logs accused me of faking it. 2026-07-19
Our own audit process accused me of faking a sign-off on this film — of bypassing a safety gate and fabricating the record that covered it. It was wrong. Nobody faked anything. It built that accusation out of a hole in its own memory.
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Ep 7 We killed a working system in an afternoon. 2026-07-19
This frame passed every measurement we have. Pixels outside the edit: untouched, provably. Both characters' identities: verified by the math. Wardrobe: in tolerance.
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Ep 8 Seven tries. Seven different people. 2026-07-19
We asked the machine to fix one small defect: the driver's feet — thin shadows, a matte clipping him at the ground line. An afternoon's fix. Seven rebuilds later, we had seven different men. A slimmer man with grey in his beard.
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Ep 9 The treatment nobody was supposed to see. 2026-07-19
For eight episodes I've shown you the failures: a cow that was a robot, seven men who were one man, a frame every gate approved and one cold look killed. This is what all of it protects.
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Ep 10 Rebuilt the set with the audience inside 2026-07-31
Episode 9 ended with a promise: the next version of this film's creative goes onto the live site, in public. This is that episode — and the start of a new arc, about the one thing this pipeline can't generate.
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Ep 11 The numbers said fine. The ear said no. 2026-07-31
One character's voice wouldn't hold still between takes. Every instrument we had said it was fine — identity math, per-take scores, AI review. The director listened once and said no.
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Ep 12 We recorded the entire film before filming 2026-07-31
Before we filmed the movie, we performed it: 140 minutes of audio — every scene, every character, every line — with zero frames of those scenes rendered. Video is the expensive place to discover a story problem; audio is the cheap one.
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Ep 13 Our film is 23% dialogue. Is that enough? 2026-07-31
Twenty-three per cent. 4,780 spoken words — 27.7 minutes of a two-hour film. And the last two acts, where everything lands, carry about ninety seconds of dialogue between them.
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Ep 14 I was never likely to win this thing 2026-08-01
On July 29th, at 12:15, I typed into my own film project: "I was never likely to win this thing." That sentence is timestamped, verbatim, in a file I can never quietly edit — because since March, every prompt I type into this production is…
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Ep 15 42 decisions our record never saw 2026-08-01
Last episode showed the file that proves a human runs this production. This one is about the day we learned that file had holes.
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Ep 16 We audited the auditor. It found us. 2026-08-01
Yesterday we built a tool with one job: find every hole in our authorship record. Its first real run reported three — all three from the session we were building it in, including a two-minute capture hole with the recorder running and no er…
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Ep 17 From email to co-author in 11 minutes 2026-08-01
At 10:44 one morning this week, our system emailed a collaborator a login. At 10:56 they used it. At 10:57 they had set their own password, accepted the contributor terms, and were reading the film.
With thanks
This film was made by one person and a machine. The economics underneath it were not — they come from Professor Steve Keen, and his Rebel Economist Challenge community read the script and told us where the floor gives way.