A filmmaker returned to the street where he shot his first childhood zombie movie and rebuilt it as a cinematic wasteland, using Jetset to bring AI-generated worlds onto a real location with just an iPhone.
The Project
Joshua Kerr’s first film was a zombie movie shot on his childhood street with friends and a camcorder. Years later he went back to the same street to remake it with today’s tools. He captured a 360-degree HDRI panorama of the street on his iPhone, generated apocalyptic versions of it (broken cars, crumbling buildings), refined them, then brought the scene to life as a navigable 3D world. The result was a haunting, explorable reimagining of his old neighborhood, complete with glowing skies, collapsing houses, and swarming zombies.
The Workflow
Lightcraft Jetset, running on an iPhone, brought the generated world onto the real location. While filming, Joshua could see the virtual environment composited live on his monitor, blending his live-action performance with the digital backdrop in real time. He approached the generated world like a location scout, exploring its lighting and depth to plan camera angles before shooting, then stayed light and handheld on the day, reacting to ideas in the moment.
The wider toolset: Marble (World Labs) generated the explorable 3D Gaussian splat world from a single image. Jetset handled real-time virtual production and on-location compositing. Beeble relit the footage to turn day into night. Unreal Engine assembled the final composite with the 3D zombies, fire, and destruction, and DaVinci Resolve finished the look, including an analog VHS aesthetic. The whole pipeline collapsed into a single-person process: generate, shoot, and composite professional-quality scenes with minimal gear.
The Takeaway
Joshua’s project shows how far one filmmaker can go today. Environment prep that once took days of modeling becomes minutes of world generation, visualized in real time on set with nothing more than an iPhone. He kept the personal charm of his original film while giving himself full creative control to redesign, relight, or reshoot instantly. The barrier to building and shooting your own worlds is no longer the budget or the crew.
It’s amazing what a single filmmaker can do today when given the right tools. It’s time to make your movie. (Joshua Kerr)
