Twenty-Four Wishes per Second
SHORT FILM · MADRID 2026
film
Twenty-Four Wishes per Second
SHORT FILM DIRECTED BY ARANTXA BARCIA MADRID · 2026
Generated shot by shot, graded and sewn by hand
Format:
DIGITAL / 16:9
Type:
SHORT FILM
Production:
MITO Films
Platform:
MITO AI
CRAFT
HISTORY, ZOETROPE TO AI with Adriana Arratia, script and edit
×9 STAGES
GENERATION, WORST SHOT Seedance, Grok Imagine, Nano Banana
×300 TAKES
GRADE DaVinci Resolve, hand-built LUTs
×3 LOOKS
CONTINUITY AND RETOUCH Photoshop, After Effects
×11 FIXES
THE ROOM posters and bookshelf, Josefa Toro
×35 TITLES
RESOLUTION, 720P TO 1080P
×2 PASSES
FINAL RUNTIME
9'12"
www.arantxabarcia.com
A DIRECTOR WITH NOTHING TO SAY
falls into a zoetrope and spends
A HUNDRED YEARS OF CINEMA
looking for the reason she started. Nine minutes,
ZOETROPE TO AI,
generated shot by shot and sewn together by hand.
TWENTY-FOUR FRAMES A SECOND,
twenty-four wishes.
twenty four wishes
“Forget wishes, tell your story.” In the script from the first draft.
TWENTY-FOUR WISHES A SECOND
TWENTY-FOUR FRAMES.
TWENTY-FOUR WISHES.
Cinema runs at twenty-four frames a
second. The frames were never the
hard part. The hard part is wanting
to tell something.
Halfway through, the Tin Man tells
her: forget wishes, tell your story.
The line was in the script from the
first draft and nobody paid it any
attention. When we went looking for
a title, we found it was already
written inside the film. The thesis
was there before we knew it was the
thesis.
chain
1834
2026
EVERY STAGE IN THIS CHAIN WAS, IN ITS DAY, THE NEW TOOL THAT WAS GOING TO KILL CINEMA.
The zoetrope is from 1834. It is the first machine that made a drawing move. Starting there and ending in AI is not decoration, it is the argument.
1834 · Zoetrope
A sequence of drawings, a turning drum. Movement begins in the gaps between still images.
1895 · Lumière
A camera pointed at the world and left running. Cinema before anyone knew what it was for.
1902 · Méliès
The camera becomes a stage for impossible things. A cut can turn an ordinary room into a dream.
1930s · Disney
Drawings gain weight, rhythm and personality. Every movement becomes a performance.
1939 · Technicolor
Colour becomes a world of its own. The image can feel as vivid as the story it tells.
1968 · 2001
A Space Odyssey. Scale, silence and a frame that asks you to look longer, leaving room for mystery.
1990 · Twin Peaks
A familiar world made strange. Atmosphere becomes part of the story.
2015 · Tangerine
A whole feature shot on a phone. A different kind of access to the moving image.
2026 · AI
A shot begins with words. Choosing what it means, and where it belongs, is still direction.
by hand
WHAT WAS DONE BY HAND, THAT YOU WILL ASSUME THE MACHINE DID
MODELS MAKE SHOTS. THEY DON'T MAKE FILMS. EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN IS THE WORK.
design
Nothing in this film was found. Every object in every frame was designed, named and approved before a single shot was generated, and most of them were redesigned two or three times after that.
SCENE
CHARACTERS
01
Design
In film
Characters
We designed Aaliyah before anything else existed, because nine minutes only hold together if she stays the same person. Braided pigtails, coral puffer jacket, the gap in her front teeth: written the same way in every prompt, never paraphrased. Everything is clay and has to look like clay, so when a shot came back smooth, or the gap closed, we generated it again.
SCENE
ART DIRECTION
02
SCENE
TITLES AND CAMERA
03
A MODEL WILL GIVE YOU A SHELF FULL OF BOOKS.
Deciding which books they are
IS STILL DIRECTION.
Art direction (editorial draft)
A room becomes somebody's room through what they keep in it. We chose the posters one by one, seventy percent of them films directed by women, and rebuilt the bookshelf as a real cinema bibliography, spine by spine.
Nobody will pause the film to read the shelves. But that is the difference between a room that belongs to someone and a set that was assembled.
Titles and camera (editorial draft)
A model does not understand “orbit around her”. It understands what has to leave the frame, and in what order, so we built the move in 3D first and handed it over as reference.
The title was animated by hand, letter by letter. Hierarchy, spacing and timing are not decisions a tool makes for you.
space
THE SPACE
A MODEL CAN GIVE YOU THE SHOT.
IT CANNOT GIVE YOU THE SPACE.
A model gives you beautiful shots, but
it doesn't know where anything is.
The whole Red Room sequence didn't
add up. The director was at the video
village in one shot and standing on set
in the next, without having moved.
The eye peered through the wall
instead of the window. The curtains
were on the wrong side.
All of that you have to decide
yourself and then force, shot by shot,
because nobody will solve it for you.
Schematic A
A · Arrival
Schematic B
B · The recorder
Schematic C
C · The set, reveal
Schematic D
D · The set, break
Schematic E
E · The prophecy
What worked was cutting the sequence first, as if the space were right, and then generating the shots that cut asked for. The other way round doesn't work.
direction
PROMPT
PERFORMANCE
THERE IS NOBODY TO GIVE THE NOTE TO. YOU GIVE IT TO THE TEXT, AND THE TEXT CARRIES EVERYTHING A DIRECTION WOULD.
Describing an emotion gets you a neutral face. What works is subtext: where each character is coming from, what they want, what they are hiding.
SCENE
THE FRUSTRATION
01
Design
In film
The frustration
The film opens on someone who has nothing to say and a client who wants it by tomorrow, and that had to land in about four seconds without a line explaining it. Describing an emotion doesn't work. "Frustrated" gets you a neutral face. What works is giving her something physical to do that only a frustrated person would do: hammering the keyboard, the cigarette already lit next to the cereal, the two-finger gesture at a screen that has already hung up. The other half of it is what she is not doing. No sigh, no head in hands, no looking at camera for sympathy. She is annoyed the way people are actually annoyed at work, which is quietly and while doing something else.
SCENE
AALIYAH AND JUDY
02
SCENE
THE RECEPTION
03
Nobody can be given a note. There is no actor to talk to between takes, no one to pull aside and tell what the scene is really about. So the note goes into the text.
Where each character is coming from, what they want, what they are hiding. Written down, before anything is generated, in the same words every time.
Do that and the performance shows up on its own: how close they stand, who leans, who breaks the hug first. Skip it and you get very good-looking people feeling nothing.
Aaliyah and Judy (editorial draft)
Judy is the one who will not let go. She hugs Aaliyah goodbye and lifts the lighter from her pocket while she does it, smiles about it, and ends up flat on the yellow brick road lighting up with it. None of that is in the dialogue: it is in what her hands are doing.
So the note goes in before generating, and it is not “warm” or “sly”. It is where each of them is coming from, what they want from the other and what they are keeping to themselves. An emotion on its own is too broad; a relationship gives the movement something to respond to.
The reception (editorial draft)
Aaliyah walks into the animation studio and the camera finds the floor first: rows of stools, and a chain on every ankle. She does not say anything about it. The next shot is her face working out what she is looking at.
Anger written as “angry” comes back as a scowl. What works is giving her something to receive: the shot before decides the performance, and the cut decides how long she has to let it land.
sewn together
Sewn together
01.0
Every shot is generated on its own. The model doesn't know what happened in the one before. So the whole film has to be sewn together, shot by shot. This is what eats the time, and what nobody imagines.
What we fixed
01.1
Detail · The bag
The bag
She carries it in some shots and not in others. We removed it from almost all of them.
01.2
Detail · The coffee maker
The coffee maker
Changed model between one shot and the next.
01.4
Detail · The film reel
The film reel
Perforations on both sides in some shots, on one side in others. A real reel has them on one.
01.5
Detail · The buns
The buns
Hair texture in some shots, clay in others.
01.6
Detail · The signs
The signs
One read "tan boss" instead of "the boss". The director's ID badge read "D55".
02.0
Some of it doesn't go away. Regenerating a shot gives you a different shot, not a corrected one, so these stayed in the film.
What regenerating won't fix
02.1
Detail · The doll
The doll
Lying at the back of a shot, looking like a dead Barbie, with no business being there.
02.2
Detail · The ghosts
The ghosts
Two characters drinking coffee, brighter and less saturated than the background, pasted on the scene.
02.3
Detail · The hands
The hands
Extra fingers.
02.4
Detail · The bookshelf
The bookshelf
The titles came out deformed. We wrote thirty-five fictional books on film and technology and set them by hand, so the shelf would say something about her too.
02.5
Detail · The phone
The phone
The buttons on her screen when her mother calls, in an invented language. Rebuilt.
cut
THE CUT
THE FILM WAS FOUND
IN THE EDIT, NOT IN THE SHOTS.
We replaced the opening wide shot
with details of her room: the fan,
posters, window, cereal and ashtray.
The boss's voice arrives before his
face, and hers comes last.
Sequences that added nothing were
cut, keeping the film under ten
minutes.
Three looks were graded by hand in
DaVinci. Skin saturation at 0.15 made
the Red Room feel lit, not filtered.
Detail · The fan
Detail · The posters
Detail · The window
Detail · The cereal
Detail · The spray cans
Detail · The cameras
THE CUT / CONT'D
The sound was designed by Olmo, but
how it enters is an editing decision:
the opening has no music, only room
tone and keys. Music arrives when it
has to, not underneath everything.
The end credits were set one by one:
hierarchy, sizes, letterspacing. No
tool decides any of that.
And over everything, grain, by hand.
The reference was analogue. Without
grain you don't believe any of it.
The hardest call was how much of the
trick to show. There was a shot where
she said it out loud, something like
"I can do whatever I want with this".
We cut it: too obvious, and it made
it sound like the machine does the
work, which is the opposite of what
the film says. Cutting it is more
elegant. It also makes the film more
ambiguous about something I am sure
of. I still don't know if that was
judgement or if I was afraid to say
it.
NOTHING HERE
was decided by the tool.
THE FILM IS THE CUT.
cost
9:12
The longest thing we've made
300
Bad versions of one shot before the good one
720
1080
Shots redone when the resolution arrived
The time didn't go into generating. Generating is fast; that was never the problem. It went to three places, none of them the one people imagine. Continuity. The bag, the coffee maker, the clips, the reel. Sewing together a film generated in pieces that don't know each other. Resolution. A good part of the film was generated at 720p, because that was what existed when we started. Then 1080 arrived and shots had to be redone. Upscaling saves nothing: when a frame holds a lot of information, a wide shot of a room full of things, the upscaler invents and comes out worse than the original. Iteration. On one shot, three hundred bad versions before the good one. That is not a figure of speech. Multiply it by every shot in nine minutes and there is the time.
THESE TOOLS ARE VERY GOOD
at doing what you ask them badly.
A BEAUTIFUL SHOT, IMMEDIATELY.
What they don't give you is
THE JUDGEMENT:
whether that shot goes before or after,
WHETHER IT'S SURPLUS,
whether she was carrying the bag,
WHERE THE LIGHT FALLS.
All of that is still
DIRECTING, THE SAME JOB
it always was.
What has changed is where the bottleneck is. It used to be budget and access. Now it's knowing what you want to say, and nobody has made that cheaper.
references
References
What each world borrows
Coraline
The texture
Kubo and the Two Strings
Made by hand
Lumière
The opening
Méliès
The trip to the moon
The Wizard of Oz
Technicolor
Twin Peaks
The red room
Tangerine
The alley
2001
The apes
LAIKA
Clay you can see the hands in
Her room
The posters, chosen one by one.
team
Twenty-Four Wishes per Second
The good decisions in this film came out of meetings, not out of one head.
DIRECTION
Arantxa Barcia
SCRIPT, EDIT
Adriana Arratia
CHARACTER DESIGN
Josefa Toro
SOUND DESIGN
Olmo Sebastián
PRODUCTION, GENERATION
Beatriz Pinto Ferreira
MOTION
Macarena Rico
PRODUCTION COMPANY
MITO Films
Made with MITO AI
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