Håkan “Zap” Andersson is one of the most respected technical minds in the VFX world of rendering and shader development. A longtime pioneer in computer graphics, Zap has been central in promoting innovations like OSL and MaterialX during his time at Autodesk.
More recently, he’s been privately pushing into the fast-moving world of Gen AI video tools and expanding on ideas we last discussed with him here on the fxpodcast in December 2024. His experiments then were with Google’s Notebook LM, which led to his UNREAL MYSTERIES episodes. This surreal series was created to both stretch his skills and probe the edges of what emerging GenAI technologies can actually do.
For this episode, Zap is back with us to unpack his latest creative experiments. He talks through his workflow, shares insights (and even his prompts) behind Nano Banana, and he reflects on what he’s learned from working with today’s cutting-edge Gen AI systems.
Alongside the episode, we’ve included an in-depth “making of” breakdown image, complete with Zap’s actual prompt examples, showing the quirks, surprises, and challenges that come with navigating this still-maturing technology.
While Zap’s experiments are playful and exploratory, they also underscore a crucial reality, today’s Gen AI video tools are not yet production-ready in many respects. Temporal stability, consistency across shots, and fine-grained creative control remain major hurdles. But the pace of development is staggering. For VFX and animation professionals, the lesson is clear, these tools may not be ready to carry a feature film just yet, but they are moving too fast, and reshaping workflows too profoundly, to be ignored.
In the podcast the guys mention a series of video tools. Here is a set of links to those programs (your mileage with them may vary):
Nano Banana
“MiniMax” (although maybe its actual name is Hailuo, nobody truly knows)
Kling
Luma Labs Dream Machine
FreePik
Upscaling:
Krea
Avatars:
Heygen
Voices:
NotebookLM
Elevenlabs
Music & Sound:
Sumo
Elevenlabs
Zap on social:
twitter.com/MasterZap
Youtube
Instagram
Twitch
And since we recorded this fxpodcast, Zap has ‘found’ a long lost episode of Space 1999. Check it out below: