In this town everyone gets one shadow. The boy in this film has two, and one of them does not copy him. That is the whole idea behind "Shadows Don't Match", a 30 second voxel horror short we built inside Atlabs in one sitting. Eleven scenes, three locations, three characters, one narrator, and a second shadow that stands up on its own.
We wanted to see how close we could get to the creepy "In this town" shorts that keep showing up on YouTube, the ones with blocky worlds, a flat deadpan narrator and one rule that nobody in the town questions. This post walks through every input we gave Atlabs and every scene that came out, so you can copy the setup with your own idea.
Shadows Don't Match at a glance
Runtime: 35 seconds
Scenes: 11
Characters: 3 (the boy, his friend, the teacher) plus a narrator
Locations: 3 (voxel town square, Minecraft classroom, bedroom)
Key element: a second shadow that moves on its own
Narrator voice: Adam, a steady middle aged American narration voice
Style: Minecraft
Background music: Edge-of-Ridge Run
Format: 9:16, built for Shorts, Reels and TikTok
Why creepy "In this town" shorts work on YouTube
The hook is in the first line. "In this town, everyone gets one shadow" sets a rule and breaks it in the next sentence. A viewer knows within four seconds whether they want the rest, and the ones who stay usually stay to the end.
Blocky worlds carry horror better than realism. Voxel characters have no faces to read, so the viewer fills in the dread. A pitch black cube standing next to a child reads as wrong without a single drop of gore.
The format is repeatable. Same town, same narrator, a new rule each week. Viewers who finish one short get served the next one, and a series builds a watch pattern faster than one off uploads.
It is short enough to rewatch. A 30 second film with a twist in the last line gets replayed, and replays feed the recommendation loop harder than almost anything else on Shorts.
Can you make money with a horror shorts channel?
YouTube requires 1,000 subscribers plus either 4,000 valid public watch hours in the past 12 months or 10 million valid public Shorts views in the past 90 days before you can apply to the Partner Programme. Shorts channels tend to hit the views threshold faster than the watch hours one, which is why short horror series are a common on ramp. Results are never guaranteed, and a channel only works if the uploads stay consistent and the writing stays sharp.
How to make a creepy Minecraft style short with AI, step by step
Write the rule first. One sentence that states how the town works, then one sentence that breaks it. Everything after that is consequence.
Keep the script to about 80 words. That is roughly 30 seconds of narration once the pauses land.
Open the Animated Video workflow in Atlabs and paste the script into the Script step. Set the aspect ratio to 9:16 and the scene pace to fast so the cuts stay short.
Pick the Minecraft style at the Style step. The voxel look is what sells the trend.
Set the narrator voice at the Cast step. Steady and flat beats dramatic for this format. Approve the characters and locations here too.
Read the screenplay before you generate. This is the step most people skip, and it is where the film is actually won. Atlabs writes a shot for each line, and you can rewrite any of them.
Generate, then export. Preview mode is the cheap way to check the look before you commit to the full video.
The inputs behind this short
Workflow: Animated Video
Style: Minecraft
Aspect ratio: 9:16
Scene pace: fast, which gives a new scene every five to ten words
Narrator: Adam
Background music: Edge-of-Ridge Run
Output: full video
The input script
That is the entire input. No shot list, no camera notes, no character sheets. Atlabs broke it into eleven scenes and wrote the shots itself.
The style: Minecraft voxel, hard light and hard shadows
Cubic everything. Characters, buildings, props and terrain are all built from blocks, with no organic bending in the animation.
Rigid motion. Limbs swing from stiff joints in stepped increments, which is exactly how the reference shorts move.
Flat colour fields. Pale cobblestone and birch against pitch black silhouettes, with very little gradient in between.
The style fits the story for one specific reason. A shadow in this film is not a lighting effect, it is a character, and a voxel world lets a shadow read as a solid black object lying on the floor. That is also the trap. Our first attempt lit two of the three sets with dim torchlight and the shadows vanished into the floor, so we rewrote every shadow shot with hard directional light, pale ground and the camera tilted down. If the shadow is the story, light the floor.
Other styles worth trying for this kind of short:
Brick Figure, for a toy brick world instead of a voxel one
Retro Pixel, for an eight bit horror look
Gothic Toon, for a storybook nightmare
Dark Urban Cartoon, for a modern city version of the same idea
Noir Comic, for hard shadows in black and white
Duotone Noir Illustration, for a flatter graphic treatment
Meet the cast: the characters and sets that stay the same in every scene
The boy
A twelve year old voxel boy in a blue blocky shirt and grey trousers, with brown cubic hair and wide square eyes. He is the narrator's body on screen and the only character with two shadows.
The friend
Same age, red shirt, bright orange cubic hair. He sits two desks away and appears in the film's first real scare, the wave.
The teacher
A tall adult villager woman in a dark green floor length robe with a wooden pointer stick. Her only job in the film is counting shadows on the classroom floor, which tells you everything about the town.
Voxel town square
Cobblestone street, oak plank houses, a wooden porch and a fountain in the distance, lit by a low evening sun that throws long shadows across the stone.
Minecraft classroom
Oak desks on pale birch floorboards with hard daylight coming through the windows, so every student casts a crisp black shadow on the floor.
Bedroom
Dark wood plank walls, a red wool bed, a wooden bedside table and a single wall torch. One hard beam of light hits the floor, which is where the shadow stands up.
Shadows Don't Match, scene by scene
Act one: the rule
Scene 1: One shadow each
Narrator: "In this town, everyone gets one shadow."
Low wide shot tracking the boy down the sunlit cobblestone street, one hard black shadow stretching toward the camera.
Scene 2: Mine has two
Narrator: "Mine has two."
Overhead shot of the street. Two separate black shadows fall from his feet at different angles, both razor sharp on the pale stone.
Scene 3: Nobody talks about it
Narrator: "Nobody talks about it."
He walks past the porch while two villagers keep their square heads turned away, arms folded, eyes anywhere else.
Act two: the school
Scene 4: The count
Narrator: "At school the teacher counts shadows before class starts."
The teacher paces the row of desks, snapping her pointer stick down at each black shadow on the bright floorboards.
Scene 5: The one that moves
Narrator: "If yours moves first, you don't come back."
High angle on the floor beside his desk. The boy sits dead still, but the left of his two shadows slides sideways on its own.
Scene 6: The wave
Narrator: "Last week my friend's shadow waved at me."
The friend sits frozen at his desk while the solid black silhouette on the bright birch wall raises its cubic arm and waves twice.
Scene 7: He hadn't moved
Narrator: "He hadn't moved."
Locked off close up on the friend's face, pupils fixed, hands clamped to the desk, torchlight flickering across his orange hair.
Act three: the bedroom
Scene 8: It stands up
Narrator: "Tonight mine stood up before I did."
The boy huddles on the red bed as the flat black shadow peels off the lit floorboards block by block and rises into a standing figure.
Scene 9: It looked at me
Narrator: "It looked at me."
The black figure rotates its cubic head on a single horizontal axis until it faces the bed. The boy slides back against the headboard.
Scene 10: It smiled
Narrator: "It smiled."
Extreme close up on the pitch black face. Two white square pixel eyes ignite with a flash and a low hum.
Act four: the ask
Scene 11: The one who goes home
Narrator: "Then it asked if it could be the one who goes home."
Low two shot. The silhouette leans down over the bed, the red wool compresses under it, and the film cuts to black on the question.
Finishing the short in the Atlabs AI editor
Once the full video is generated, every scene is still editable. You can swap an image, redo the motion on a single shot, change a voiceover line or rewrite a scene's prompt without regenerating the whole film. We used that to fix the lighting problem on our first pass, and it is also where you set the background music and the captions.
Ready to publish? Turn the film into a Short
Check the aspect ratio is 9:16 so it fills a phone screen with no bars.
Set the captions to short chunks, one to three words at a time, centred and large. That matches what the trend shorts do and it keeps eyes on the middle of the frame.
Export at 1080p or 2K, which is plenty for Shorts.
Upload with the first narration line as the title. "In this town, everyone gets one shadow" is a better title than anything you could write about the film.
Frequently asked questions
How long did this take to make?
The full run, from pasting the script to a finished video, took under an hour including one rewrite of the shadow shots. The generation itself runs in about five minutes.
Do I need to write a screenplay?
No. You paste a script or an idea and Atlabs writes the screenplay for you. You can then edit any line of it before generating, which is what we did here.
Why did the shadows not show up on the first attempt?
The sets were lit with dim torchlight, so the shadows had nothing bright to fall on. Rewriting the shots with hard directional light, pale floors and a downward camera angle fixed it.
Can I keep the same characters across a series?
Yes. Characters, locations and props are saved to your library and can be reused in later films, which is how you keep a weekly series looking consistent.
Can I change the narrator voice?
Yes, at the Cast step, and you can change it afterwards too. For this format a flat, steady voice works better than a dramatic one.
What aspect ratios can I use?
9:16, 16:9, 1:1, 4:3 and 3:4. For Shorts, Reels and TikTok use 9:16.
How much does it cost?
Pricing starts free, with paid plans from $19 per month, Trustpilot rating 4.5/5.
Make your own creepy voxel short
One rule, one broken rule, and a thing in the corner of the frame that should not be moving. That is the whole recipe. Write the eighty words, pick the Minecraft style, check the screenplay before you generate, and you have a Short ready to upload.
