From Backyard to Blockbuster: How Lightcraft and Beeble Empowered a New Kind of Indie Filmmaking

Overview

Every filmmaker remembers their first project — the wild ambition, the borrowed props, the backyard sets.

For filmmaker and YouTuber Joshua Kerr, that memory was a zombie movie filmed on his childhood street with a few friends and a camcorder.

Years later, Joshua returned to that same street to reimagine his early film using the latest tools — Marble, Lightcraft Jetset and Beeble.

The result was more than a nostalgic experiment. It demonstrated how easily AI-powered filmmaking can unlock creative possibilities for anyone.

Using only an iPhone, a few world generations, and a lightweight virtual production setup, Joshua transformed an ordinary neighborhood into a cinematic wasteland — complete with glowing skies, collapsing houses, and swarming zombies.

Collaboration

The collaboration between Marble and Lightcraft explored a shared goal: making virtual production approachable for every filmmaker, regardless of resources or technical background.

• Marble provided the creative foundation, transforming a single edited image into a fully explorable 3D Gaussian Splat (3DGS) environment with realistic lighting, depth, and spatial coherence.
• Lightcraft Jetset, built on the company’s Emmy-winning Previzion system, brought that generated world directly onto the set. Running on an iPhone or iPad, Jetset allowed Joshua to visualize the Marble-generated environment in real time while filming — blending live-action performance with a virtual backdrop on location.

Together, Marble and Jetset created a portable, affordable virtual production workflow. There was no need for LED walls, large crews, or complex VFX pipelines — just creativity, a phone, and a story to tell.

The Project

Joshua’s goal was both personal and technical: to recreate his first childhood zombie movie on the same street where it all began, this time combining real footage with AI-generated environments and characters.

He started by capturing a 360° HDRI panorama of the street using his iPhone. The image became the foundation for his digital transformation.
Through Gemini, he generated apocalyptic versions filled with broken cars, tangled tentacles, and crumbling buildings — then refined the results in Photoshop.

The final image was imported into Marble, which generated a detailed, navigable 3D world using Gaussian splatting.
This virtual set became the stage for his new short — a haunting, explorable reimagining of his old neighborhood.

Creative Process

The film began as a simple idea: revisit the same street where Joshua shot his first zombie movie and explore what could be created using today’s technology.
Rather than crafting a complex narrative, he wanted to rediscover the excitement of filmmaking itself — and test how this new workflow could empower small-scale creativity.

Joshua approached the Marble-generated environment like a real-world location scout. He explored its lighting, composition, and spatial depth to plan camera angles before stepping on set.
With Jetset’s real-time compositing, he could preview each shot instantly, watching his quiet suburban street turn into a post-apocalyptic landscape on the monitor.

Filming with Jetset on an iPhone allowed him to stay light and spontaneous, capturing handheld shots and reacting to new ideas in the moment — just as he had done as a kid, but now with the polish and precision of modern virtual production tools.

Technical Workflow

After capturing live-action footage, Joshua and his small team combined a suite of modern tools to bring the scene together:

• Marble — Generated the 3D Gaussian Splat world from a single HDRI image.
• Lightcraft Jetset — Enabled real-time virtual production and compositing on location using an iPhone.
• Beeble AI — Used for relighting to transform day footage into night.
• Unreal Engine — Assembled and rendered the final composite, adding 3D zombies, fire, and destruction.
• DaVinci Resolve — Applied finishing touches, color grading, and the analog VHS aesthetic that completed the look.

This compact workflow compressed an entire studio pipeline into a single-person process, proving that filmmakers can now generate, shoot, and composite professional-quality scenes with minimal equipment and full creative control.

Results & Impact

Creative Impact

• Enabled Joshua to rebuild his childhood film with cinematic visuals while keeping its personal charm.
• Offered full creative control to redesign, re-light, or reshoot instantly without rebuilding the environment.

Technical Impact

• Reduced environment preparation from days of modeling to minutes of world generation.
• Delivered real-time visualization directly on set using only an iPhone.

Cultural Impact

The project resonated deeply within Joshua’s creator community, showing that professional-level virtual production no longer requires a large team or budget.
With tools like Marble and Jetset, any filmmaker can produce high-quality visual stories — even in their own backyard.

Looking Ahead

Following the project’s success, Joshua continues to explore AI-driven worldbuilding and real-time production. His next goal is to use Marble to plan multi-scene sequences that connect into larger, continuous story worlds.

For both Marble and Lightcraft, this collaboration marks a new phase of creative empowerment — focused not on replacing artists, but on giving everyone the freedom to build and shoot their own worlds without technical barriers.

Both teams are developing educational resources and shared workflows to make these tools even more accessible — helping more creators bring their stories to life through the evolving language of AI-assisted filmmaking.

🎥 Watch Joshua’s channel: YouTube — Joshua M. Kerr

🔗 Learn more about Lightcraft Jetset: lightcraft.pro/jetset

🔗 Learn more about Beeble: Beeble.ai