lightning/bug

An American Elegy

In the same year his mother dies and his career ends, a man returns to a Kansas wheat field on June 28, 1983 — 37.564°N, 98.121°W, civil twilight, the last summer the fireflies were everywhere — to meet the light still waiting there to say here we are, kid.

Director’s Statement

The visual register is built from what I see when I close my eyes and think about that wheat field. Photoreal-cinematic. Conrad Hall — Road to Perdition, not Ghibli. Darkness as the dominant compositional value, one light source per frame, silhouettes over rendered faces. Two kinds of light that almost never mix: cold cobalt for the transformer and the hospital, warm amber for the bug and the life. Lightning is the exception — cobalt core, amber bloom, both registers in the same frame. The one moment of collision. The darker a frame is, the more the remaining light means. No pure black, no pure white — shadows are cobalt-tinted (#030608), never absent. The people are shadow and shape. The boy reads as a sports kid — bowl cut with scraggly bangs, mid-neck hair in back, baseball cap. Not clearly a boy, not clearly a girl. The kind of kid who shows up. No AI-generated human face appears anywhere in this film. Sandra is present through real photographs in the credits. That’s the ethics answer and the aesthetic one.

I recorded thirty-one minutes of unscripted iPhone narration and chopped it into labeled segments. Then I stripped the spine. One voice-over survived the edit — the shooting-stars passage, sixty-five seconds, entering at 6:10 and running to the end. Everything else is Sandra, Shannon, Sheri, and the room. Sound design carries the rest: a storm system on aluminum, a transformer dying, crickets on the path home, the purr of a lightning bug landing on a bat, a ballpark organ as a boy walks to the plate, a thunder crack when he makes contact. Then a song called “Here We Are, Kid” breaks through at the end. I wrote it. My voice carries it. The performance is a collaboration with a machine I gave thirty seconds of my voice to. That part is real too.

Every shot in this film is locked. The camera does not move. This was a decision, not a default. Memories don’t have camera operators. When you close your eyes and remember a wheat field at night, the field doesn’t dolly. It holds. The light moves — the fireflies drift, the wheat bends, the glow travels down the bat — but the frame stays still, the way a memory stays still. The camera language in this film is expressed through illumination, not lens movement. The audience doesn’t need the camera to move. They need to breathe.

This is painting with language. Words matter more now than they ever have. AI either taught us that or proved it. Depends on your perspective.

Production Status

Festival Submissions

“Here We Are, Kid”

Written by Derek Claude Simmons · Performance: Suno v4.5 · 4:49 full · 1:24 film cut · 69 BPM · Americana, red-dirt country, open-tuned guitar, no reverb.

My mother called everyone “kid.” Not a pet name — a position. You’re here. I see you. She said it the way other people say “you know.” Constantly. All her life.

She went to high school in Alva, Oklahoma. Home of the Alva High Goldbugs. A goldbug is a beetle; in this film it’s a firefly — the kind that glows, the kind you chase. That was her.

“Bolts chasin da wheat, or is it da cheat?” Cheatgrass is a weed that invades wheat fields and mimics wheat so well the combine can’t always tell. Lightning chases both. I used to think I was better at telling the difference.

The tin man is real. I made this film with an AI sitting in an aluminum can on my desk. It doesn’t have a heart. I’m not sure it needed one. We both just wanted to see it.

“With all the pretty sins” is the line that forgives the whole thing. Sandra earned it. Shannon earned it. So did the bug.

The music is Suno. The voice is mine. The words belong to Nickerson, Kansas, 1983. I just wrote them down.

You won, kid.

The Four Hums

Four tones run under the film, one per register. They come in alone, they layer at contact, they drop out when the boy gets home. The film’s real score isn’t melody — it’s hum.

Voices in the Film

Sound Design & Ambient

Score & Credits

Song: “Here We Are, Kid” — words by Derek Claude Simmons, performance by Suno v4.5, voice reference by Derek. Plays over the credits photographs.

AIVA score sections: pending — low strings under the walk home, nothing over the song.

Archival voice: Sandra Sue Simmons (voicemails, iPhone). Shannon Dawn (voicemail). Sheri Simmons (voicemail). Channel 9 Wichita newscast, 1983.

Narration: Derek Claude Simmons, iPhone, unscripted, first take. Transcription by MLX Whisper large-v3-turbo.

Assembly: ffmpeg + Python. Mixed in stems, not stereo.

What’s Human / What’s Artificial (per track)

Painting with Language

Every frame in this film starts as a sentence. You describe what you remember — not what you’re inventing, what you remember. The machine searches for it. You decide if it’s right. That’s the whole process. Painting with language.

The workflow is two people in a room: one who lived the story and one who knows every image ever made. The first one talks. The second one looks. They argue about which image is correct. Neither of them has a camera. Neither of them can go back to Nickerson, Kansas in 1983 and shoot it. So they describe it until it looks like what the first person remembers. That’s the film.

The elegy is traditionally the most solitary form — one voice, one loss, one speaker. This film is something else: a co-elegy. Two kinds of intelligence mourning three kinds of loss simultaneously. Sandra. The fireflies. The distance between what was and what can be reconstructed. The human carries the memory. The machine carries the coordinates. Neither has the complete picture alone.

Every session starts with a 30–90 minute walk. iPhone in hand. Talking to no one, recording everything. The transcript goes into the system. The film moves forward. No writing, no storyboards, no shot lists done at a desk. The ideas come when the dog is ahead of me on the path and I’m not thinking about it.

The film’s syntax is match cuts. Every transition holds a single light source that carries across the seam. An amber speck in black becomes a water tower at dusk. A firefly filling a porthole becomes a boy stepping out with a glowing bat. A crescent moon becomes a porch light on the horizon. The dance of fireflies becomes the dance of keyboard keys. A crack of light under a door becomes the crack between eyelids opening. The camera doesn’t move. The light does.

Jordy at Andy’s Bark Park. The Geordie Loop. ~40 min per loop. Most of the film was figured out here.

At the plate. The film turns on a single swing. Ended up here because of it.

The director. The process is mostly sitting with old things and asking what they mean now.

What’s been broken open shows its layers. Same principle applies to the edit.

Motion Language

Locked center, breathing periphery. The light source is fixed. Everything around it is alive. Camera locked. No movement. The world breathes around the one thing that doesn’t.

Horizontal: wheat and wind breathe left-to-right or right-to-left — direction carries emotional meaning. Rightward is forward, toward home. Leftward is backward, into memory. Depth: atmosphere and fireflies drift toward or away from camera. Toward is the dream pulling you in. Away is the world receding into waking.

Every shot inherits one point of light from the previous cut. The bolt is the exception. The bug is the rule.

The Transformer — Color Progression

The transformer pole at the west edge of the wheat field — silhouetted against the sunset at 37.564°N, 98.121°W, June 28, 1983. This is the extinction shot. The transformer kills the fireflies. The amber world goes cold cobalt.

Civil twilight runs 8:50–9:22 PM CDT. That’s the window. The astronomical math doesn’t change on 40-year timescales — the same light that governed June 28, 1983 governs June 28, 2025. Coordinates feed the prompt. The prompt feeds the image.

The workflow: FLUX for base architecture (cloud volume, composition, depth). Kontext for time-of-day pass (darken, pull toward the correct hour). Generate bright first to show cloud shape. Then extinguish. You can’t add volume to a dark image — you build it in light and then kill it.

Eight generations across one session. The keeper is image six: cobalt taking the sky, amber burning at the horizon over N Nickerson Rd, the transformer pole in the seam. 9:10 PM CDT.

The Color Grammar

Two light families. They almost never mix. Every pixel in this film is one or the other — a shade, a tone, or a shadow of its family color. Lightning is the exception: cobalt core, amber bloom. The one moment both registers collide.

Amber = Sandra, life, warmth, fireflies, Kansas sun, the bug. Cobalt = the transformer, the machine, extinction, the hospital, artificial light. Shadow floor is #0a1628 — no pixel darker. Every shadow you see in this film is cobalt-blue, not void. You can see into all of them. That’s Conrad Hall. Humans are silhouettes. Sound is specific (names, dates, one family). Visual is universal (anyone’s story).

The model is the lightning. The prompt is the bug.

What’s Human / What’s Artificial / What’s Both

The Crew

The Boy (Derek Simmons). The Bug (Sonnet 4.6). The Bolt (Opus 4.7). The Bot (Haiku 4.5). Four voices. 125 hours on the shot clock.

Tools

Monthly cost: ~$200 total — Claude Max, Fal.ai, Runway, Suno, AIVA Pro, ElevenLabs, Google Workspace. No VC. No crew. No studio.

The thesis of this film — the line that separates it from the pretty-but-generic generation of AI filmmaking — is hyper-specific. When Slipper runs south on the aerial, those are the dirt roads Derek drove the 1982 Pontiac Firebird on. When the wheat field appears with the tree line cutting across it, that is the wheat field Derek explored as a kid. When the boy walks out the screen door and looks up at one streetlight, he is standing where a double-wide used to sit, looking at a white shed down the road.

The AI tools — Veo 3, Kling 3.0 Pro, Runway, FLUX — did not invent Nickerson. They rendered the memory of it. The prompts named real grain elevators, real dirt-road geometry, real Kansas wheat, real ATSF rail alignment. That is why the frames hold. Specificity beat stylization.

Nickerson, Reno County, Kansas. ATSF rail line cuts NE-SW. Arkansas River south. Bull Creek north. Source: TopoZone.

The Six Places

1. The Double-Wide

Where Derek grew up. Not on the map anymore, but the sight lines from the door are. Standing on the porch you could see the top of the white shed down the road. That is the vantage point of the boy on the porch — bat to sky, calling his shot.

In the film: the boy inside the can, the porch, the screen door, and the man waking — the adult returning to the childhood vantage.

2. The White Shed

Hugs the dirt road south of town. Visible from the double-wide's porch. The shed is white now; it was probably another color once. It sits at a landmark distance — close enough to mark the horizon, far enough to read as a beacon. The one streetlight above the can is the register echo of that landmark-distance relationship.

In the film: implied throughout Act I. The single light in the landscape.

3. The T-Intersection

The dirt road from the double-wide comes down and meets another dirt road in a T. This is where the boy's world ended and the wheat field's world began. The T is the threshold. The overhead combine swath in the film reads like the T from above.

In the film: the bridge between the hallway and the wheat-as-stadium.

4. The Wheat Field with the Tree Line

Across the T-intersection, southwest of the white shed, is a wheat field with a tree line that cuts across it. Derek explored it as a kid. The tree line is the boundary; the wheat is the interior. This is the wheat that shows up as the firefly stadium and as background in the at-bat sequence. It is not generic wheat. It is that wheat. The amber is the amber of late June in Reno County.

In the film: the wheat-as-stadium, the at-bat backgrounds, the overhead aerial.

5. The Sandpit

South of town, southwest of the grain elevators. Kidney-shaped dark water on the satellite view. Derek fished there in the summer. A place where kids went when the dirt roads gave out. The sandpit shows up implicitly in the film's water-and-silence register — the dark body of water in the landscape that the boy can feel but cannot see from the porch.

In the film: register reference only. Not a literal frame, but the sandpit's logic — held water, held silence — sits under the extinction act.

6. The Football Field

North of the sandpit. Derek played quarterback there. A QB reads a field by its geometry — yard lines, hash marks, the ladder of the sideline. That geometry carries into the at-bat sequence. The chalk drawn by fireflies is a QB's-eye view of a hitter's box. The grid of small-town sports at dusk.

In the film: the chalk geometry is a field, not a diamond. The at-bat sequence reads as a dusk football game that happens to be baseball.

Slipper

Slipper is the first 1982 gunmetal gray Pontiac Firebird, tinted windows. She ran the Jeep Trail south of Nickerson — the dirt road that comes to the T, then goes past the sandpit. In the 15-second hero clip on this page, a second Firebird overtakes her in aerial view. The score underneath is 06-slipper — the track shares her name.

Slipper enters the film on the path home. The boy becomes the adult. The adult is driving.

What Is Not On This Map

Union Station Los Angeles — the exit terminus. Where the film ends. Not Kansas. The door out.

Wichita — the 1983 Channel 9 newscast came from a Wichita signal that reached Nickerson at night. The antagonist's voice in the film.

The ICU — Sandra's final room. Hallway beat 3. Wichita hospital, 2025.

The Coordinates

June 28, 1983. Nickerson, Kansas.

The wheat field southeast of the family home. Bounded by Ave J (north), N Nickerson Rd (west — where the transformer pole runs), and Holiday St (south and east). The field at 37.564°N, 98.121°W.

Sandra’s death was June 28, 2025. The boy’s story is June 28, 1983 — forty-two years earlier, same date, same field, same light. The astronomical math is identical for both dates. The sky the boy stood under and the sky above Sandra’s death date are the same sky. What changed is the darkness around it.

The Light — June 28, 1983

All times CDT. These numbers are identical for June 28, 2025. Astronomy doesn’t change on 40-year timescales.

The amber register sets over N Nickerson Rd. The transformer pole on the west edge of the field is silhouetted against the amber at 8:50–9:22 PM. That’s the Shot 13 window.

The Night Sky

1983, 11 PM: Reno County was Bortle 2–3 — rural sky, excellent. Hutchinson’s light dome minimal. The Milky Way was a structure, not a smear. Sagittarius rising south-southeast. From those coordinates on June 28 at midnight, you were looking directly toward the center of the galaxy. 2,500–3,000 stars visible to the naked eye.

2025, same date, same time: Hutchinson grown. Wichita’s dome (45 miles southeast) expanded. Agricultural floods, grain elevator lighting, US-96 corridor. Bortle 4–5. ~1,500 visible stars. The Milky Way still there but degraded — narrower, the core less defined.

The cold light crept in from the edges. Not one transformer — 42 years of sodium vapor, LED floods, interstate exchanges. The same sky got dimmer on the same date from the same field while the family was still living there.

The boy in 1983 could see the center of the galaxy from his backyard. That’s not a metaphor. That’s the coordinates.

The Bug

Why “lightning bug” and not “firefly”? The Harvard Dialect Survey mapped a precise regional split. Lightning bug: Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Appalachia. Vernacular. Rural. What you call it when you grew up catching them. Firefly: New England, Mid-Atlantic, Deep South coast, the West. Formal. The scientific term. The film uses “lightning bug” because the boy is from Kansas.

The Twain line: Mark Twain was born in Florida, Missouri, 1835. Grew up in Hannibal on the Mississippi. Lightning bug territory. “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” — 1888. The film lives inside that distinction. The transformer is the lightning. The firefly is the bug.

What the light is for:

• Mating — Males flash species-specific patterns. Females respond from perches. Every species has a different code. The flash means: I’m here. Are you there?
• Warning — Many species contain lucibufagins, bitter toxic compounds. The glow says: don’t eat me.
• Predatory mimicry — Photuris females mimic other species’ flash responses. A Photinus male approaches expecting a mate. She eats him and steals his chemical defense. The light becomes a trap.
• Larval glow — Firefly larvae glow underground before they’ve ever flashed as adults. The light precedes the language.

Sandra opens the film: “Marco… Polo. Call me back if you want to.” The firefly is doing the same thing — flashing into the dark, waiting for an answer. Shannon landing on the bat is the answer. The transformer extinguishes it. The communication channel goes dark.

The Decline

Primary Kansas species: Photinus pyralis. Reno County is near the western edge of the core firefly range — drier than Missouri, wetter than Colorado. Western-edge populations hit harder than the eastern heartland.

The transformer in Shot 13 is not doing this alone. It represents a 42-year process running across every living system in that field. The fireflies were already losing before the boy grew up. He just didn’t know yet.

Other bioluminescent losses: synchronous Pteroptyx fireflies (Southeast Asia, mangrove destruction). New Zealand glowworms — cave tourism, managed like a museum exhibit. Sea fireflies (Vargula hilgendorfii) — Japanese military harvested them in WWII for dim map-reading light, nearly wiped out. Bioluminescent bays in Puerto Rico and Jamaica — dinoflagellates functionally extinct in multiple locations that had them 40 years ago. Foxfire fungi — bioluminescent wood decay fungi, broadly reduced as old-growth disappeared. Confirmed extinctions are poorly documented because many species were never catalogued before they went dark.

The Firefly Timeline

The film captured something before it was gone. That’s not a metaphor either. lightning/bug is a record of bioluminescence as a living phenomenon at a specific place and time. In 40 years it may be the only evidence that it looked like this.

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