Ballast is producing Bigfoot Enterprises, an independent dramatic feature film currently in pre-production and raising financing. The film tells the origin story of Roger Patterson, who recruits his rodeo pal Bob Gimlin to film the mythic creature, setting off a national obsession and a wave of controversy. It's a period piece set between 1967 and 1972, spanning Hollywood, New York, and Washington State. Ambitious in scale, and on paper, hard to picture. The team needed a way to previsualize scenes before shooting, and a way to get investors past their assumptions about the subject matter fast.

Hypernatural ended up doing both.

Traditionally, previs for a film like this means storyboard artists, boardomatics, and a lot of stock footage or title cards to paper over gaps. It's slow, and it's expensive at the scale Ballast needed.

The bigger problem was money. Without AI, building the film's world (1960s Hollywood, New York, and Washington State) would have cost roughly ten times the team's actual budget.

There was also a perception problem. The word Bigfoot alone puts a picture in people's heads, and it's usually the wrong one: documentary, or monster movie. Scripts and decks weren't enough to get past it. People had already decided what the movie was before reading a page.

Ballast used Hypernatural to bring their style frames, mood boards, and screenplay to life as motion, in a shared workspace the whole team could see and revise together.

A few things stood out:

• Products and characters, made consistent. The team uploaded reference images for cars, cast, and settings, then called them back into any scene and got dependable, consistent results.
• A shared workspace. Everyone (director, writer, editor) worked off the same canvas. If someone generated a clip on desktop, the rest of the team could review it instantly from the app on their phone.
• Filling gaps from the script. When there wasn't an image for a scene yet, the team could generate a first pass straight from the screenplay text, then refine from there.
• The agent. Once the team started using Hypernatural's agent, they could describe what they wanted in plain language instead of perfecting the prompts, and get results that felt tailored to how they actually talk.

What started as previs turned into something bigger: a full trailer, built entirely before a single frame of the film was shot.

Boardomatics and storyboard cuts were always an internal tool. They helped the team see a scene, but they were never something you'd send to an investor or post on social.

Hypernatural changed that. Partway through the process, the team pivoted from using it strictly for previs to building a full trailer, and that shift opened up a use case traditional previs never could.

The trailer gave the team a marketing asset they didn't have before: something they could send to investors, but also something built for social and audience-facing marketing down the line.

The trailer changed how people responded. Investors and partners who weren't replying to scripts and decks started replying within hours of getting a link. After several unanswered emails, Eric sent one prospective investor a one-line message with the trailer attached. Three hours later, the reply came back: "okay this is AMAZING." Another investor watched the trailer and responded the same way right before committing to the project: "That looks fantastic!"

The trailer also solved the perception problem. It let people see the tone and world of the film instead of guessing at it from the title, and that alone moved conversations forward that had been stuck.

Having Hypernatural as part of the process also helped credibility with investors directly. Being able to say a real platform was already part of the pipeline, not just an idea, gave the project more weight in early conversations.

Beyond the platform itself, the team called out something less expected: what it was like working directly with Hypernatural's team. Coming from a landscape of impersonal AI tools, having real people who were responsive and invested in the project stood out.

Ballast is in the final stretch of fundraising, aiming to close before a state production incentive deadline. Even if that specific window closes, the team feels the project has enough momentum to move forward regardless.

They plan to keep using Hypernatural past previs and fundraising, into wrap: social content, short-form marketing, and material to support the film once it's shooting. The team is also planning to try Hypernatural's MCP integration with Claude, to plan and generate in one connected workflow instead of switching tools.