Happy New Year 2026!

2025 is leaving the stage. A complicated year that began with disappointments, which in turn changed all of the plans we set out to accomplish during the year. In some way we… or rather Jac, got stuck, but not in a limbo, he was always active and moving on, but without what was expected in his way of doing things.

The final days of 2025 came very fast, it sounds very dramatic, perhaps too dramatic, specially in these holidays, but those looming final days of the year had some good activity before the festivities took over, all those family lunches, dinners and parties. During the month of December and first part of January there are many birthdays in the family, the one closing the festivities in the new year will be Jac’s aunt’s birthday, she’s turning 98 in the middle of January.

Before all that endless hoopla, Ligia, Dani and Jac were busy shooting scenes for CruXbound. Dani was working the camera, under Jac’s direction. Ligia was suffering the indignities of being dragged almost naked, all chained up, led to a hanging chain, almost hanged by the neck and mercilessly whipped by Jac. That’s the beginning of the new film.

Jac decided to do the CruXbound film with Ligia all over again, from scratch. He worked with Ligia at the beginning of the year and did some great scenes for the film, but then Ligia got a contract and her time was limited, Jac was going through a lot of stress for the things that were happening those days, like the important trip to NY that had to be postponed as well as the failed campaign to raise funds for Crucified Four, and many other unexpected problems. He began the year, however, shooting with Simonne before his frustrated trip.

Jac decided to do Ligia’s film all over again this time because she looks different. Her hair is much longer, for one, and somehow she looks more dramatic. Ligia herself, when she saw the images commented:

Uhhh I look like a martyr there, for real. 👏👏🙏 the light does total justice to my face, it looks very dramatic. Very, very nice. It looks like night light and it outlines my face very well. It’s beautiful.

The beginning of the new version of the film is somewhat different from what Jac did before. Back at the beginning of the year he had Ligia dragged by her neck, wearing the metal waist belt with the heavy ball attached to it. The scene was very dramatic. She was then made to stand on a metal platform with spikes, her neck attached to a chain in the ceiling and whipped, harshly.

After a few days of working in the set with Ligia and Dani, Jac went off into a lot of family issues, beginning with the arrival of his brother, from NY, they have a lot of things to do.

At the same time he was working on his AI explorations, gaining more insight into that and noticing that it has become some kind of a universal freak show. Apparently a lot of people are playing with it. He found all kinds of images generated with AI that are similar to what he was doing, rendering his AI work kind of repetitive. He will use AI a little, a lot less than what he thought he would. He’s actually annoyed with the whole thing.

He expressed that much at one point when he wasn’t getting what he wanted from AI.

One of the things he was finding this new development in technology useful for was dubbing a film into other languages. But AI is not really ready for that task. Below there’s an example of what Jac did.

He took the raw footage of a scene in Seditiosa, just to test the program he was using. He set the selected scene up to dub into english.

The results were mixed, at the very beginning, where two characters in the scene said things that were off camera and the program made it look like it was the two in the camera who were making some of those off camera comments; but then, when the scene began there were some issues when Ligia started talking. It came out weird. When Simonne began her lines, it was great, Dani’s voice off camera was good too. And for a while the scene looked good, Simonne’s lips in synch without changing her expression. At the end, when the scene was over, it got crazy again, funny crazy.

Overall, it was not horrible. It was not the best, but it was good enough. Take a look.

Dubbing a film with AI is a good possibility, if all the conditions are in place and the program does a good job. It can happen under certain technical specifications. It is an option.

Other good possible uses of AI that may be good are still under consideration. I’ll have more about that in the future.

But in general, Jac is annoyed with AI. It promises a lot but the delivery is not up to his expectations and, again, everyone is doing it so it looses its charm. He believes that even his cats can create some short movies just by walking on the keyboard.

And so we close the year of our ladies 2025 and begin the first steps on the new year, the start of a new cycle and the beginning of new things.

One new element on this new cycle is what has become the rule in film distribution: Streaming. Our channel is growing, both in films and in audience, it is a slow process but it is becoming an important way of showing our films. We don’t know how far it will go, how many subscribers we will have by the end of 2026, if it goes as we modestly hope, it will be a good thing. It will give us the real possibility of having steady productions.

We recently added Fantom to our channel and more are going to be uploaded in the coming days.