Gossip Goblin on Pomegranate, Two Hours After It Premiered

Two thousand stickers.

This was the second ever Creator Session, and the first broadcast to the guest's own channel as well as ours. Pomegranate had premiered on Gossip Goblin's YouTube channel two hours earlier, and Chris and Andrew had each watched it twice already.

“I have to say, the most stunning thing I've ever experienced in AI to date.”

Chris Branch▶ 3:40

The first audience question was the obvious one: why Gossip Goblin? Zack had used his own name as his Instagram handle for 11 or 12 years and wanted something more professional. A sticker website was running a promotion. He tried a few names on impulse, liked the ring of Gossip Goblin, being a goblin fan, and ordered around 2,000 stickers because the price was too good to refuse.

“Once you have 2,000 stickers with a handle on it, you can't change your username.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 5:30

It is now the name of his studio and his handle on everything. Too late to change it, he says.

Bitterness, and a fake country.

Zack went to university for art, studying sculpture: metal casting and big pieces, a hard hobby to keep up once you leave. He fell back on illustration, never as a day job but as what he did outside work, and spent his twenties and early thirties self-publishing books of short stories and illustrations. He also drew art for Magic: The Gathering cards.

He first played with AI about four and a half years before this session, when it was janky and pure novelty, the era of Shrek memes and Will Smith eating spaghetti. Early DALL-E models showed you could vaguely get what you wanted. Then a Midjourney version jumped from psychedelic nonsense to something close to photorealistic, and he made a clear choice.

“I don't want to eat into that part of me, mostly out of a certain bitterness. I've spent decades learning a craft. I don't want to automate that overnight.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 8:55

So no AI illustration or animation, and nothing that approximates a human skill. Rendering real life, though, looked like fun. His first big AI project was a photo essay series about Urum Kuan, a made-up country in the Altai Mountains between Mongolia and China, written in the tone of a 1970s or 1980s National Geographic: a little politically incorrect, but well intentioned. Ceremonies, strange technology, a former Soviet mix with Harajuku influence.

“If you could make a world from scratch but make it believable, what would it be?”

Gossip Goblin▶ 9:50

At the time, AI feeds were full of Mario Breaking Bad and Harry Potter Balenciaga. Urum Kuan got real traction anyway, and showed him a medium for telling stories and building worlds. When video arrived, he was already telling stories with it.

A man on the moon with stone age tools.

Early on you could barely make a character walk in the direction you wanted, and a scene where a character kisses a frog could take 500 Runway generations and still never land. The tech has since caught up with storytelling, and three years on he says there are basically no limits. He still writes with the tools in mind, because he is directing and helping animate the world as well as writing it.

“The scripts that I write are still somewhat shaped by what the tech can do.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 12:22

Asked whether he designs characters first or finds the voices first, he went back to his first long form film, WOODNUTS, about 12 minutes long. It had no lip sync at all, just voiceover narration, and it was made before Nano Banana. In a way it was far more challenging than Pomegranate.

“It feels like we put a man on the moon using stone age technology.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 14:30

“When we started being able to really convincingly lip-sync and drive performances, then it became way more important to get the performance and the polish right.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 14:48

So he stopped accepting audio clips sent in, and started directing actors himself. The Patchwright is voiced by Goshfather, a DJ in San Francisco Zack knows from the internet and a former opera singer, who had just played a run of World Cup events. The script is written around how he would say it, and he goes off script all the time. A small secondary character at the start of The Patchwright was voiced by a British voice actor Zack found in Sweden.

“Probably the only professional British voice actor in Sweden who happens to be really good.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 16:05

He liked that pairing so much that he built the next film's whole script around that character and that voice.

The hosts had spotted four animators and a colourist in the credits. Zack does the short form lore on Instagram, YouTube and X largely on his own, but the long form work is a full team effort.

Fifteen years of goblin stories.

Asked whether he has older stories waiting to become films, Zack ran off camera and came back holding a book: The Gossip of Goblins, his collection of short stories and illustrations. It isn't for sale any more.

Many of its stories explore alternate history, the natural world and human prehistory, plus a lot of goblins. Some connect a real event, like the Mongol sack of Baghdad or Ben Franklin harnessing electricity, then jump 5,000 years ahead and extrapolate. They don't adapt one to one into the world of the films, but he has been writing since he graduated about 15 years ago, and he writes with a co-writer, Jacob Batchelor, as well as solo.

“There's a large body of work to draw from and find ways to adapt, rather than having to constantly come up with new ideas from scratch.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 21:13

How many heroes before they taste the same?

Part one introduces the aristocrat at the heart of the film. He arrives at a grimy workshop, complains about the neighbourhood, and asks the mechanic to thread him into a new spool without the sales pitch. Inside, he is the Leviathan, a sea beast that has been gorging on the oceans since the dawn of time, with a ship's crew set on slaying it. He bails out with his safe word, pomegranate, which he insists he is perfectly capable of remembering, and complains that monsters, krakens and serpents all start to taste the same.

On a third viewing, Chris was picking up the character design, the sound design and the script all over again. Then Andrew asked whether Pomegranate was built in order, or out of sequence the way films are shot.

“There's no workflow set in stone.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 31:31

Every six months, he says, a new wave of tools changes the approach. Kling 3 was one. At the start of 2026 Seedance arrived and blew everything else out of the water, and Seedance 2.5 was about to change everything again. So the build isn't linear. The team carves out scenes and works on them separately, often just to validate a look quickly.

“Can this be animated? Can the aesthetic of this scene be preserved?”

Gossip Goblin▶ 32:40

Midjourney has huge nuance, and with Photoshop and Nano Banana you can push an image very far. The question is whether that aesthetic survives being brought to life, or only works as a painting and falls apart in motion. The same goes for characters speaking and moving. Each scene and character is designed and validated separately, then the pieces are put together.

There is no single prompt.

A viewer asked which real cultures inspired the world. None directly, Zack said. He hasn't played video games in ten years, and with a one-year-old at home he definitely doesn't have time now, yet someone will always say his most random idea is derivative of an obscure Korean indie game.

“It's impossible to be original.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 34:20

Each simulation did get a brief, though. The ship is Moby Dick-esque, a South China Sea junk with sails and strange steampunk machinery on board, set in no real time or place. The god king's court was briefed as the Sassanid Empire: Persia around 600 BC with some Ottoman influence, an over-the-top, exoticised idea of an empire in the cradle of civilisation, with costumes mixed from tapestries the team liked.

People joke about how long his prompts are. They are long, he admits, but that misses the point. These things can't fully be described in words. The real work is exploration: finding a colour palette and textures you love, putting them on characters, then finding the themes that unify them. That matters for ownership too, with a brazen number of copycats out there.

“It's worth spending the time to really try and collage your own worlds together. It's not a single prompt.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 37:58

No budging on voice actors.

Part two drops the aristocrat into the god king's court, where a vizier has summoned the most exquisite delights from the farthest reaches of the kingdom in the hope the god king's divine loins may yet stir. It doesn't work for the aristocrat either. Back in the workshop he explains that the parts were all there, the music and the wine, but the sum of it was nothing. Next comes a war memory, a bayonet in the cradle wars, felt from both sides, and then the confession that he has loved women across whole simulated lives and can't recall any of their names.

Chris's questions on a third watch were about the audio. Zack was very involved in it.

“We cycled through quite a few different musicians to score this film.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 49:28

Getting the score right took an incredibly long time, and a Foley artist was brought in to heighten the effects. Seedance is very good at sound effects, he said, but it isn't the real thing.

“Before I was making this stuff, I think I just took sound design for granted.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 49:55

Voices are where he won't budge. Seed audio is pretty good, he said, and he had choice words for ElevenLabs. AI voices still have a long way to go, and he doesn't see himself ever using them for long form. Ask a model for a gruff, illiterate sailor missing some teeth and you get the lowest common denominator: a rounded, blunted, hyper generic accent that the whole world is now pulling from.

“I can't prompt for this because I don't think the AI even knows what this is.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 52:04

The actor who plays the mechanic, who grew up in Lincoln, was channelling the dad of one of his friends, who used to buy them alcohol when they were underage. Music works the same way. A score is tailored to what is on screen, with recurring motifs and swells that hint at what's to come. AI music, he says, mostly gives you Eurovision happy hardcore.

Hollywood is people.

An audience question: when will AI take over Hollywood? Zack isn't concerned. The bigger challenge to Hollywood, he thinks, is that so much of what we watch isn't scripted at all: get ready with me videos, unboxings, and a man reviewing KFC popcorn chicken in his car. Zack watched all 15 minutes and found it riveting. The man weighed three boxes to check the portions.

He would like to believe a team spending months or years on something earns more of your minutes than that. AI will start to eat into high-end content, and also flood the market with low-end content, which is why the public narrative about AI is an uphill battle for creators like him. What he can't stand is the combative framing, like the line about a $200 million sci-fi film made for $4 in a weekend.

“There's no reason to frame in that language because Hollywood is not some monolithic entity. Those are people. A lot of them are really brilliant.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 57:20

If you're tired of sequels, he said, stop paying only for them and go and support good films. Every technical change, from CGI to recorded scores replacing live orchestras, brings pushback. AI's problem is that many people can't tell generative tools from Skynet, so an indie creator with staff on payroll making short films gets treated like Palantir.

“My goal is not to kill Hollywood at all. And I don't think that AI will by any means.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 58:00

A fly. A whole life.

In part three the aristocrat lays it all out. He has incarnated as warriors, peasants, romantics and nearly every creature, across hundreds of thousands of years, and none of it registers any more. There is a finite amount of wonder a soul can carry, and he has spent it. The mechanic offers something not on the menu, on the house. Then, after experiencing a fly's whole life in 24 hours, he asks for a transfer rig. Substrate migrations are a lot more permanent, the mechanic warns. Pomegranate won't work this time.

Paul let the credits run, which answered a lot of the chat's questions. There were four voice actors in total, one playing two parts, largely down to who was available. Zack is based in Sweden and wanted to record live and in person, so he booked a recording studio for three or four days. Some of The Patchwright was recorded remotely, and it's hard to iterate that way.

“It's easier to just work with a smaller team in person.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 1:11:23

Then the news. The film had been announced that day in Variety, Forbes, IndieWire and Deadline: Gossip Goblin has a film coming to theatres. It is still, he said, a very indie operation.

“I'm still hustling and jumping into an Uber with ring lights to drive across town to go record and direct an actor and capture their face.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 1:11:59

Post-production and audio mixing are handled by a team in Romania, the animators QA the shots, and everyone wears several hats. People radically underestimate the complexity, he said. He wrote Pomegranate's script himself. Asked whether British sayings like giving it to him on the house were the actor's, he said the actors improvise both delivery and words, down to slipping a line into a faint French accent, which raises the question of whether France exists in this universe.

The pinball was easy. Dialogue isn't.

A viewer assumed the pinball world was the hardest thing to make. It was the opposite: the shortest scene in the film, and the one that took the least time.

“When you remove human characters from the equation and you remove a lot of room scale continuity from the equation, you have a lot more flexibility.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 1:14:48

The god king sequence was the shockingly complicated one, because of the dialogue.

“Ironically, what should be really easy now is incredibly difficult still.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 1:15:33

There is still no reliable lip sync or, more precisely, no mocap solution, he said. Kling has a motion feature, fine for making your cat dance, but not for recording a performance and translating it into a character. You need precise audio delivered with exactly the right expression, stretched across what is basically a 30-minute film, plus coverage, continuity and consistent backgrounds. Seedance has made life easier, but it is still a struggle.

Melvin asked whether he blocks scenes with live acting, props or Blender. No: there is no 3D pipeline at all. He has seen workflows built that way and thinks some of them are overengineered. His is the old-school way: capture a scene, then capture all the different angles, manipulating the images with Nano Banana to get the blocking and coverage the scene needs.

Not if, but when.

Fable was in the credits, and Aaron in the chat asked how that came about. Zack announced the theatrical release: Gods Don't Give Gifts, in theatres on 30 October, a little shy of 100 days away. Fable helped produce and fund the development, and is his partner on the roll-out.

“It's not a matter of if, but when, AI starts to proliferate into the mainstream.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 1:18:05

Maybe people will burn down a theatre, he joked, or there will be a battle outside a small cinema in Berkeley. The film is an anthology of several stories merged with an overlapping theme, more self-contained than the YouTube films: here is the world, here is its trajectory, and here are smaller stories nestled inside it. He hopes each one works as a standalone for someone who has no idea who he is. Since the session, Fable has moved the US release to 4 December 2026.

Then a question the hosts had been wondering about themselves: is the opening a flash forward? Not quite. It is a bookend. The tear leaking from his face isn't blood but some internal mechanism, more poignant than blood. The opening montage is a speedrun of a million lifetimes, all the way to his strip tease for the god emperor, the moment that drew the most comments in the chat.

“I got a lot of push back on that one.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 1:20:26

Internally and from others, people asked how far is too far, and whether it was tonally right. It stayed in, and the hosts were glad he fought for it.

Get enough good shots, then find the film.

Tracy Swedlow of TV of Tomorrow asked how many iterations a segment takes. A lot, and it varies. The real answer is the team: an editor and sound mixer who make things work that Zack couldn't see. He admits he didn't properly respect how critical editing is. Everyone on the team can edit, and everyone acts as a mini director on their scenes, working from storyboards with timestamps and descriptions of every beat.

“It's like jazz in a lot of ways.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 1:22:23

You can guide it, but it won't give you what you want every time. Sometimes you grab it by the throat and burn through an ungodly amount, boiling an ocean. Sometimes you accept a happy accident rather than waste weeks. As long as the overall melody is working, you can allow a few notes that are out of place.

“Let's get enough shots that we know are good enough quality, and then we can afterwards make sense of what combination really works.”

Gossip Goblin▶ 1:23:38

That also answered Danny Ratcliff's question about how much of his vision survives into the generations. A conversation between two people has to be exact. The pinball could be looser, because each simulation has an idea behind it.

Behind it all sit a screenplay, storyboards, and mood and reference audio for the team to keep in their heads before the real score exists. For the ship, medieval hurdy-gurdy music felt a little too Pirates of the Caribbean, so they went towards Barry Lyndon and The Master. It keeps a hybrid crew aligned: some very visual, some analytical, some technical and precise.

The last question: where does the inspiration come from now? He has a lifetime of it to draw on, but his life is work and his one-year-old, and in four-minute slivers of free time he doom scrolls, back to the man weighing his KFC popcorn chicken. Having a baby isn't boring, he added when the chat pushed back. It is phenomenal and gratifying, just not intellectually stimulating. The hosts promised to bring him back for all the questions they didn't reach.