RatKid and the Red Balloon

The story

On festival morning in Elvira, a city stacked up the walls of a waterfall gorge, RatKid loses his red balloon off the palace balcony at the top of the city and goes over the edge after it: down the neck of a giant Longneck, through the market tiers and across a laundry line twenty storeys up, onto a theatre skyship mid-play, down the Great Falls, and back up to the tip of the Bell Spire at sunset.

Chapters

1. The Crown Terrace
2. The Market Tiers
3. The Gilded Lark
4. The Great Falls
5. The Bell Spire

How it was made with Katechon Arc

1. Wrote a world bible and five chapter shot lists, with the brief to introduce the city rather than a hero and to show, not tell.
2. Built character and set sheets in Arc, then generated shots chapter by chapter from the confirmed scripts.
3. Switched video providers mid-production as balances ran out; the project kept the same references, so the cast held across providers.
4. Added a narrator, an animated cross-section map between chapters and chapter cards, and mixed to -14 LUFS outside Arc.

Production facts

What we learned

• A style rule like "the red balloon is the only red" leaked into the sheets: the image model painted balloons into eight set sheets. Phrasing it as "no red in sets or wardrobe" and adding "empty plate, no balloons" to set descriptions fixed it.
• Which provider renders a queued shot is decided when it is dispatched, so changing the project's video model also changes shots that are already queued.

Watch

RatKid and the Red Balloon (9:44) is free to watch on YouTube on the Katechon Studio channel, published 2026-10-04. It was made by the Katechon team with Katechon Arc; editing, music and finishing were done outside Katechon Arc where noted.

More films made with Arc

Make one like it: start from the AI short drama workflow or see how Arc works.