The Project

Entrenched is a grounded, character-driven Star Wars story set within The Empire Strikes Back, during the Battle of Hoth, following a character named Jobin. The Dowlings deliberately chose a non-canon corner of the universe and drew inspiration from Andor: no lightsabers, less fantasy, more weight. The setup was humble. They shot in a garage, threw up a green screen, lit it flat, and made their own props, including 3D-printed pieces. The ambition was the opposite of the setup: produce the kind of spectacle big studios spend hundreds of millions on, and prove an independent team can do it too.

The Workflow

Jetset runs on an iPhone mounted to the camera, capturing the shot and the camera tracking together and outputting straight to Blender or Unreal. That is the advantage the Dowlings keep returning to. They are no longer limited by location, which they call the single biggest problem in the film industry. They build the world first, treating it as a digital location scout, so when an actor performs they already know a ship is about to fly overhead and can frame for it.

The pipeline is fast. Footage and tracking from the camera and the iPhone run through Autoshot, which outputs a finished Blender file. Early on a shot took about two hours end to end. Now it is closer to one. After working through every Lightcraft tutorial, they shot from 10pm to 5am on their first night and turned around a complete shot, VFX and edit included, in two to four hours. As Roman puts it, they have flipped post-VFX into pre-VFX.

They solved scale the same resourceful way. To fill battle scenes with crowds they did not have, they used iPhone motion capture, so nearly everyone in the background is one of them, performed and multiplied. A small garage becomes a vast world.

The economics are the punchline. A conventional setup still means buying a tracker, exporting to Unreal, hunting for matching footage, and syncing it by hand. An LED volume runs $50,000 and still needs cleanup. Jetset does the tracking from a phone on the camera. As they say, it sounds crazy to people until they see it work.

The Takeaway

Entrenched is a proof of concept for every independent filmmaker: the tools exist, and the only real limits are the ones in your head. A crew of about ten, most of them wearing several hats, made a studio-scale Star Wars film in a garage because they treated the technology as a green light rather than a compromise. The Dowlings call themselves full-stack creators who direct, shoot, and finish their own work. They are now planning films a decade out, not because the budget is there, but because they know they can get there.

It’s not just the tools, it’s the mindset of understanding that there are no limits. The technology is there. You just have to pick it up.