BLVCKL!GHT: 30 Shows, 100 Characters, One World, and How Route 47 Gets Distributed

Thursday's viewing, Monday's lease.

The August everyone expected to be quiet wasn't: Seedance 2.5 dropped and client briefs piled up. Chris had met BLVCKL!GHT at Upscale in San Francisco, Magnific's event of around 900 people. Stepping out for a cigarette, BLVCKL!GHT was swamped by six different people with cameras, and was still being interviewed half an hour later. He doesn't go to many events.

“New for me. I was like, oh, after being in my own world for so long.”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 2:40

After a tribute to Dolly Parton, Chris asked about the studio. A friend with a studio in the same Portland building had started weekly hangouts with local creators, including PJ Ace, Tupacabra and Vnderworld. One Thursday a space opened on the top floor. By the next Monday three of them had signed the lease. It is in a rough part of town, which he sees as where culture comes from, and it is entirely self-funded.

“Trying to own your own stuff and maintain that for as long as possible has been important to me, and that's everything from content to the words that come out of my mouth.”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 8:33

Where does the host go after the show?

Andrew asked for world building in plain terms. BLVCKL!GHT compared it to Dreams on PlayStation: you start with a flat plane, and everything is built on top of it. A world has rules that bleed into the locations, people, objects and food.

“There's like rules of the world where for me everyone has this weird body horror sort of element to it, but nobody addresses it. It's just one of the rules of this world.”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 11:23

Then the characters. Each might have a single purpose in one show, but seen from far enough away they have whole lives. His example is the Cryptid Dating Game, a dating show where contestants try to match with cryptids.

“The host is very weird and cryptid looking himself and he's the host of that show, but he leaves the studio at the end of the day. So what's the rest of his life like?”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 12:28

Breaking characters out of the show they live in, and letting them cross into each other's stories, is what turns a set of shows into a universe. Chris picked out the shift in thinking: set how a character behaves in the world, not just what happens in one episode. Route 47 is now 29 or 30 shows and close to 100 characters.

“If you were to take a 10,000 foot view out, they're a complex character. They have other things that they do besides like the show.”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 12:11

The off-ramp that funds the next one.

He had just been asked to judge a festival Chris called Lumara, run by Venice, the platform with lighter restrictions on models like Seedance. For a creator making PG-13 and mature work that might be too gory for other platforms, that matters. Chris also thanked him for his articles on X, which call out companies and competitions when creators are being treated badly.

Then distribution. Fairground, which now places AI content on Roku and Amazon, approached him a couple of years ago with nothing built yet, only a vision and a team. Its CEO, Colin, had run Xumo, one of the pioneers of free ad-supported TV. BLVCKL!GHT was already on escape.ai, John Gaeta's platform, but saw more exposure there than revenue.

“It's the off-ramp and replenishment stage for any creative.”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 18:45

Even with creative partnerships, his AI spend was five figures last year and five figures the year before. So the money from one project has to fund the next.

“When you're funding it yourself, you care about the cost and you figure out very quickly I have to distribute this.”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 19:25

The catch is that it is a leap of faith. This is the first wave, the ad revenue and the numbers aren't there yet, and it works on trust in both directions. It isn't for anyone who needs money now. He puts out so much content that the investment made sense.

Twelve hours, minimum.

Chris told the story of escape.ai's Escape Awards, where BLVCKL!GHT won the first award of the night and missed it, asleep after a project kept him up until 4 or 5am. That is his normal pace.

“I work full-time on top of doing AI. So I'm usually doing like a minimum of 12 hour days every day.”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 23:07

His day job is VP of operations at a national marketing company he helped build out of a garage with the owners ten years ago. He works in workflow optimisation and has been in digital marketing for 15 years, in insurance and home services, a highly regulated industry.

“There's a level of ethics standards that I have to abide by in advertising and marketing that I naturally carry over into AI.”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 23:57

Mary in the chat asked how much of his dark, high-contrast look comes from custom models. Most of it. He has at least 20 custom-trained LoRA models, from FLUX.1 to Krea's models, and broke away from Midjourney about two years ago. It's a great exploration tool and a good gateway into AI, he says, but originality starts earlier than the prompt.

A new model for every accident.

West Coast AI Labs is not a traditional studio. Everyone is an independent creator, there is no boss, and the space is for bouncing ideas around. They had all started making Portland content when Tupacabra suggested a stuntman who gets wrecked over and over. BLVCKL!GHT took it on.

“In every episode something happens to Stu. And so the next episode has a new character model with the repercussions from the previous thing.”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 27:11

That makes 10 or 11 character models so far, his body more affected with every one. The episode we screened starts with Stu leaving hospital.

▶ Watch Stu Needs A Dollar

“If I was just going through the channels and it was on TV, I wouldn't be thinking this is AI.”

Andrew Davis▶ 30:19

It was made in Seedance, and the places are real. Mary's is a strip club four blocks from the studio, open every day for 75 years, and the shots of Stu walking in match what it really looks like because BLVCKL!GHT walked over and photographed it. In another episode Stu tightrope-walks across one of Portland's steel bridges. Real photography, mixed with his characters.

Twenty-two minutes in a thirty-minute box.

Social numbers, he warned, can be gamed: his own X account is being botted, people pay for engagement, and some creators grow through agency networks. Platforms also show the same work differently. His biggest audience is on TikTok, where 8-minute 16:9 stories get huge watch numbers, against every rule of social media. On Instagram, where viewers can't flip to widescreen, engagement is far lower.

Andrew had lived this. When he left the BBC for MySpace in 2006, he found the same content that worked at the BBC could get zero views on a MySpace profile.

“Content is king is a myth. Content is king if people see it.”

Andrew Davis▶ 35:01

BLVCKL!GHT brought it back to TV. In a 30-minute slot you are making 22 minutes of content around two or three ad breaks, and only a handful of AI creators are working at that length. It takes real pacing to hold a viewer who has the TV on in the background while scrolling their phone.

“If you want to play that game, you got to get in the box.”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 37:26

Chris admitted nothing in pure AI has held his attention past 45 minutes. BLVCKL!GHT's answers were packaging, stringing three shorts into one block with a through line like a narrator, as Tales from the Crypt and The Twilight Zone did, and nonlinear storytelling. His fifth film over an hour long, Mr. Gurgleson's Midnight Hour, is deliberately out of order, drip-feeding information so you leave with something to think about.

Chris added the budget version of the same mistake: clients arrive with 80 or 100 thousand for a project, all of it for the creative, and nothing left for distribution.

How do you portray a cheap budget?

Stu was a Portland one-off. Over the weekend before the session he had started something new: the Saturday morning cartoons he loved as a kid, brought up to 2026 with darker, more adult humour, building the lore towards a full episode.

Tim from Theoretically Media summed up the chat: 13-year-old him would love it as much as he does now. The trick was hiding in plain sight.

“All of these were generated in 480 on purpose, because it's supposed to be older footage, which isn't high fidelity.”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 54:07

Everything was upscaled to 1080 and left there. The acting and blocking copy the cheap shows of the era too, and generating at 480p is far cheaper in credits. He trained a custom model on 90s practical-effects TV, specifically Saturday morning shows. His own childhood favourite was Zoobilee Zoo, with Ben Vereen, where performers dressed as animal characters taught children about the arts.

The image models are custom models in Krea, for both locations and characters. Then he named the trap he is avoiding. Familiar-looking fantasy, the dragons everyone is making, is what he calls hi-fi slop: it looks great, but an advertiser who thinks it is too close to Game of Thrones won't run against it, and on ad-supported TV the advertisers approve everything.

“If an advertiser feels that that is too close to Game of Thrones and they don't want to be put up against your content, it's dead in the water.”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 59:45

Not off my back.

A viewer asked about nodes. He says yes and no. His preference is Flora, because you work on a canvas, collaboratively, and it makes the node connections for you: name your character references and it pulls them in. For anyone who finds nodes intimidating, it teaches how a scene is built, from character sheet and location and object references to an image and then a video.

Chris had told NVIDIA something similar: agents should build node systems you can open, learn from and tweak, rather than working as black magic. Then BLVCKL!GHT gave his hot take.

“I've spent thousands of hours developing my own workflows, my own styles. I'm not giving those out to people.”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 1:03:10

It isn't selfishness, he says. What works for him may not work for someone telling different stories. Custom workflows have real value, and the people who want them free are the ones who want to profit from them.

“I'm down for everyone being successful, but not off of my back.”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 1:03:43

Where Route 47 started.

In December 2024 he was independent and reached out to Vnderworld and Hax, the original West Coast AI Labs founders, because their work pushed models in ways nobody else did. Together they made an AI take on Everything Is Terrible, the LA artists who mash old VHS footage into strange mixed-media films. It turned out harder than prompting, because you generate far more footage than you use and then have to make sense of it.

Gorbo's was the first custom model he made, trained on photos from his childhood trips to Florida theme parks and the 80s and 90s art he had as a kid. The park itself is based on a real swimming hole he went to growing up, which closed after a child caught a brain amoeba. Kids there had alcohol squirted in their ears when they got out of the water.

“All of this kind of came together and that's where Gorbo's Swim Hole started, and that's where Route 47 started, at Gorbo's.”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 1:06:35

▶ Watch Gorbo's Swim Hole

Chris paused it at the pump room to save time for the game.

Gorbo's, on Steam.

About a year ago he was approached by developers who had worked on Insomniac's Ratchet & Clank and on Subway Surfers. In January they pivoted, and what they were building overlapped with Route 47. The game will be on Steam and starts with Gorbo's Swim Hole: a multiplayer, open-world experience where you visit the park and try the rides. He has weekly calls with the team and provides all the assets, while they do the game development.

Chris asked how Steam feels about generative assets. The chain matters. Route 47's assets start with his own images, photography and art, which trained a model, which made images, which become 3D assets that are hand-built into the map.

“The AI part of the process is so small in comparison to the work that's being done around building the game itself.”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 1:17:38

His profile has said creating generative experiences for a long time. He sees himself as one of the experience builders whose worlds people will walk into.

Inject yourself at every step.

Chris raised the grey areas: when AI has to be declared, and what counts as generative music. BLVCKL!GHT's answer is human authorship, and he comes at it as a musician. He has played piano since he was five and was classically trained for ten years, and music is how he got into all of this, with years of his own samples, ditties and recordings.

“Human authorship is always going to be the thing that you have to prove, and the more tools that you stack on top of that, the more of a house of cards it kind of becomes.”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 1:19:32

Chris pointed out how well musicians have moved into AI. They already know DAWs, and he finds the best marketers are often music heads too.

A hundred thousand is enough.

“I'm not a Gossip Goblin, right? I don't have a team of people and voice actors and backing and all of these things.”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 1:22:03

His point is that one person can bring their own art and find their people. His biggest audiences, on TikTok and elsewhere, are addicted to the content, and talk about it as their show.

“When people claim their show is on, you don't own it anymore.”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 1:22:48

It doesn't need millions. A hundred thousand people who show up can be all it takes. And cult classics last: Rocky Horror was a box office flop that Tim Curry was embarrassed by, until midnight screenings made it iconic. Andrew added Fight Club, Scarface and Money Heist, which ran two seasons on a Spanish channel before Netflix picked it up.

Chris noted that streamers like Amazon Prime and Roku now want AI content the way Netflix once wanted any content, and will need quality control. Fairground is already selective.

His feedback to Fairground was to give creators the rules of the box: the time slots, the themes, what people want to watch and how engagement looks. Feedback loops, so creators build towards something instead of constantly market testing. His last advice, for students and newcomers, was to pick one platform that does everything, like Krea or Magnific, and not to rush. Mr. Gurgleson's Midnight Hour is on his YouTube channel now.

“Don't feel rushed. Don't feel overwhelmed. There's a lot of pieces to it. And don't learn something new until you need it.”

BLVCKL!GHT▶ 1:30:48