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Videolab: Seven Carves a Pumpkin

Originally published 2026-10-26 on Advisory Hour.

Originally published as an Advisory Hour Substack post on 2026-10-26. This first-party site copy preserves the text, localizes public supporting media, and connects the record to its project trail.

Original post

Videolab: Seven Carves a Pumpkin image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Videolab: Seven Carves a Pumpkin image from the original Advisory Hour post.

Seven has been working on the same pumpkin since Tuesday.

When I posted Gamelab: Carve Night, it came with a normal trailer. A narrator, the music, clips from the game. This time I wanted to try something different, so here’s a short story.

It’s 48 seconds long. It’s Halloween week in the workshop. Rosie is on her tablet, Rin is leaning on the shelves with her arms crossed, and Seven is on the workbench carving the same pumpkin he’s been carving all week. He won’t let anybody see it. He says it’s a self-portrait.

Rin isn’t buying it. “He’s a box with a screen.”

Then he shows them, and I’ll leave the rest to the video.

Videolab: Seven Carves a Pumpkin video 1 from the original Advisory Hour post.

How it was made

It’s built with a new video pipeline I’ve been working on, based on John’s world. It’s a local H3 plus a refined orchestration set over an orchestrator API that cleverly wraps comfy UI. It’s the same approach I used for the Mud Truck ‘99 and Firehawk videos, and it’s the first one with all three of them together: Rosie, Rin and Seven.

It’s not perfect. If you watch closely, there’s these little tiny details that aren’t quite right. The pumpkin lights up before the candle ever gets inside it, and then the candle just stops existing. Rosie’s headphone cable becomes part of her jacket. The lip-sync is approximate at best.

Which is roughly how my real pumpkins turn out, so I’m not too bothered.

Trailers to stories

This is the direction I’m heading. A trailer tells you what something is. A short story gives you a reason to care about who’s in it. Every project still needs some way to show what it does, but I’m going to shift more of it toward story-driven pieces like this one, using this pipeline with the different projects.

The game has more of Seven in it than the video does. In Carve Night he sits at the end of the table with his own mini pumpkin, scans every step you take with a blue visor beam, and copies it with one thing wrong. His pumpkin is cut by the same code as yours, so his mistakes are real cuts.

Videolab: Seven Carves a Pumpkin image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Videolab: Seven Carves a Pumpkin image from the original Advisory Hour post.

So a video where he finally gets a pumpkin right, and it turns out to be his own face, felt like the right story to tell.

The Screenshots

Videolab: Seven Carves a Pumpkin image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Videolab: Seven Carves a Pumpkin image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Videolab: Seven Carves a Pumpkin image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Videolab: Seven Carves a Pumpkin image from the original Advisory Hour post.

I’ve got more experiments coming with this pipeline. You’ll see them soon.

For now, there’s a pumpkin on the workbench, and it might be looking back at you. Happy carving.

Play now: Carve Night

Read more: Carve Night in GameLab

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