GLENROE — HISTORICAL ENVIRONMENT WORLDBUILDING

Debuting on RTÉ One, the Irish state broadcaster, in 1983, Glenroe was a rural soap opera filmed on location in Wicklow and created by Wesley Burrowes.

The series concluded its run in 2001, a few years before YouTube heralded the video age of the internet. Commissioner RTÉ is notorious for the lack of professionalism in tape archiving and backup, and remains highly selective with the titles made available on their RTÉ Player service—meaning that Glenroe in 2026 is all but forgotten.

Inspired by memory and having hunted down what is regarded today as a rare, clean broadcast tape, I was curious to apply modern AI methods to see what could be extracted from a narrow selection of historical sources.

Having learned the year prior how effective video models are at training on low-resolution footage, digitized VHS scrapes of the original series provided a wide gamut of performances and an abundance of takes, returning remarkably high-fidelity character LoRAs.

Expanding further on this, I was interested to vie for consistent backgrounds—notoriously tricky continuity challenges in generative and inferred graphics. After months of experiments with Gaussian splats, MCP-guided Blender builds, and 360° scenes, the models progressed to the point of generating consistent, volumetric 3D layouts.

The work here is far from "fire and forget". The 3D models took minutes to generate (while the latlongs took hours to paint and fill in the gaps), but simple production realities mean that no two reference shots are dressed alike: sets were refurbished, props were moved, and in some cases even the walls and architecture of the studio sets were adjusted over the 18 years the series ran.

An additional challenge lies in the reverse angles. Broadcast television frequently shoots from a rigid set of camera setups. Unlike feature films, this leaves a total void of evidence for what the room looked like behind the lens. While generative AI can extrapolate the unseen, true authenticity requires trawling through hundreds of hours of archive footage in a desperate hunt for reverse angles that can be fed into inference to guarantee historical accuracy to the real set.

All of this speaks to a core principle: AI is really good as a workhorse that brings intelligence, however the more effort and brainpower added to the recipe, the better the output. Yes, marketers may be able to generate three minutes of their "The Joker with Wolverine's Claws" fan movie in an afternoon. But in the sixty minutes of effort they expended, they're unlikely to have mused over which cigarette brands were on sale in the cigarette machine—and whether those were phased out by the series' end in 2001.