The Travel Writer is Heidi Ewing’s second narrative feature: a travel writer sets off to a remote Sicilian village in 1985, and the story moves between the island and New York.
Generative video and audio on a narrative feature in post: I proposed the work, chose the tools for each approach, and delivered the results into the cut.
Object removal, set extensions, and generative coverage where a reshoot wasn’t possible, across Runway ML, Adobe Firefly, GPT Image 2 and Nano Banana 2, with the removal built locally in ComfyUI on my own hardware. Then temp ADR in the actors’ voices, English and Italian, generated in ElevenLabs for new lines written after test screenings. Delivered across three weeks, each shot finished and cut into the film inside a five-month post schedule.
Knowing the story is what let me specify the shot. The VFX team was in Malta and unsure they could get movement into the background, and what Ewing wanted was easier to show than to describe - so I generated the version the scene actually needed and put it in front of them. We built the assets from there, and it is the shot that is in the film.
The car removal was an editorial decision before it was a technical one. Ewing wanted the scene earlier in the film, but the Fiat parked in it is a plot device the story introduces later - moved as shot, the scene would have given it away. Taking the car out made the scene portable, and it went where the cut wanted it.
The generated POV was a story problem too. A wine barrel recurs across a whole movement of the film, and the shot that registers it the first time never got made - location moves took the day. It was buildable because the room was already covered from other angles and sizes in other scenes: enough reference to reposition the camera and generate his eyeline on the barrel. The prop arrives where the story needs it.
“My family has no desire to be at war with the Trapani family any longer.”
“La mia famiglia non vuole più guerra con i Trapani.”
This idea started in a test screening. Audiences were losing the thread of a few storylines and needed more clarity than the cut was giving them. The fix was temp ADR for dialogue that had never been written, let alone shot. I wrote the lines and generated them in the actors’ own voices, built from their production audio, in both of the film’s languages, so the scene could be judged in the room instead of imagined. Samples above.