How Lollipop Racing put a dozen Porsches on screen in two months

No industry argues about AI louder than film. Directors write "no AI" clauses into their deals, festivals fight over disclosure rules, and every generated frame anyone catches becomes a news cycle. The whole argument rests on one assumption — that you can tell.

Damon "H" Chung of H1FILMS would like to enter some doubt into the record. H is a producer on Lollipop Racing, the motorsport series from Feature.io, directed by Steven Ilous. It was shot live in Thailand with a dozen Porsches, two McLarens and a Lamborghini, and a handful of its shots and elements were generated by H in FLORA. Since it came out, he says, "not a single person questioned if anything was AI."

H is not an AI guy who wandered into film. He studied VFX and editing at Pratt, then left the desk: "I hated being behind the computer, so I wanted to pick up a camera." He cut music videos for Hype Williams until Hype let him shoot them, and has since worked on projects with Kanye, Coldplay, Busta Rhymes and more. He is now based in Thailand, where productions run lean: ambitious projects come here to shoot, but the budgets don't always come with them.

A race against the calendar

Lollipop Racing wasn’t just about a race on screen; getting it made was a race too. H came on as a producer in early September, with part one due to the series' partners by the first week of November. "Everybody was saying there wasn't enough time," he says.

The cars alone were a production. In a country where import duties can turn a $300,000 Porsche into a $1,000,000 car, the car meet scene needed twelve of them, sourced through Lollipop Racing's partners and co-producer Waruth "Oat" Seehanath of Infinite Media and Liberty Walk Thailand. Principal photography ran two full days in early October with director of photography Tone Prot Promprot, scheduled a week apart to maximize prep, plus run-and-gun days and a set of small studio pickups. Then came two weeks of round-the-clock post to deliver part one on time.

The large VFX shots were led by Feature, from the CG car work and the hero car reveal to the titles and the race-screen HUD, with Steven leading design.

H handled the conform and brought in two partners: Focus VFX, for character roto and compositing on the hero car reveal, and the motion graphics artist behind the 3D track explainer in the part two intro.

"You have to feed it that information"

Where H's work met FLORA was in the gaps: shots the schedule couldn't cover, and fixes the footage needed.

H never prompted from scratch. His rule for every generated element was to feed the tool the production itself: reference frames from the actual shoot, images of the actual actors and cars, a sketch of the exact pose. Lollipop was shot anamorphic, and the optical character of an anamorphic lens is not something AI was familiar with yet. "You kind of have to feed it that information," he says. The generated elements inherited the look of the film because the inputs came out of the film. On the tool itself, he is direct: "For being able to feed multiple ingredients, drawing up a pose and having it create in its likeness, FLORA was way better than any alternative."

The shot that was never filmed

The one that mattered most came late in the edit, when a new ending took shape: the hero hears a voice and looks back over his shoulder. There was no such shot, and getting one meant another shoot day: the location, the actor and the car all over again, plus camera and lighting rentals and the full crew.

Instead, H fed FLORA about a dozen reference images of the actor along with Steven's hand-drawn sketch of the pose, and generated the frame in the actor's likeness with Nano Banana. Because the sketch sat right in the FLORA canvas, director and producer could go back and forth on the image directly, a new kind of collaboration that got them to the shot they needed. Veo 3.1 then animated the turn from the hero's back to facing camera. It became the final shot of part two, closing Episode Zero.

H used FLORA to fix footage, too. Lighting a face inside a racing helmet without making the frame look fake is close to impossible, so he fed FLORA images of the actor playing the driver and had it re-render the face in the original footage: same actor, same performance, better light. For a livestream scene shot practically and composited in After Effects, he generated the roughly fifty user profile icons, animated GIFs included. And for the part two character introductions, he generated the car turntables.

"Feed it the right type of shots"

"AI works better when you have actual filmmakers that understand camera and lighting, and have a little VFX background," he says. "It wasn't hard for us to get realistic shots out. We just had to feed it the right reference."

H plans productions differently now: the shot list gets built knowing which shots have to be filmed and which can be generated, so the budget is accurate on day one instead of at the crisis. "The majority of the time, clients have no issues with me using AI," he says. "Any project that's open to AI, I'm game."

Watch Lollipop Racing at lollipop.racing, and see more of H’s work at h1films.com.