Gen AI short film – Time after Time
This little idea was done in a few days and started life as only music. My wife and I speculated on the name of the track and came up with ‘Netflix fantasy drama, quirky girl finds mysterious clock in attic’, which let to this story of a woman who cheats time by visiting this age reversing clock. We see her revisitng this old friend of hers, again.
I used a combination of Ai tools to create this. ChatGPT vision model, Magnifica, Kling and Runway.
When doing these kinds of tests, the goal for me is to explore the tools, it’s never to have a perfect piece. I feel there’s a value in using and trying everything and see where it takes me. Using the ‘front door’ approach without using ComfyUI is becoming an interesting balance. Every week there is an update to the consumer tools that could often take a lot longer to set up in ComfyUI. We live in interesting times!
So, first off I created various looks of this girl at various ages in life, and also created contact sheets to aloow quick trianing.
I also created various ages of ‘Red Station Wagons’ that she would drive.
Instead of relying on the Ai model to create the correct camera movements. I shot them on my phone, and used a combination of tools to swap the background and then me out of the shot.
Whilst using ‘Comfy Ui’ would have resulted in a more consistant output, I wanted to do this test over a few days, so I went with the more typical ‘front door’ approach with Kling.
Whilst the images are all Ai, I did create the music in a non-Ai way, just sitting in my studio.
For some of the more cinematic shots I wanted a specific camera movement, as I could have spent time re-generating shots in AI describing with text, but instead I made a very basic house and forest, and animated the camera exactly how I wanted it. I didn’t need to spend any time on details as I’d give the AI model some other reference as stills. However, it does take the circle window from the attic.
This balance of using CG to get the camera angles, shot proportions,and the right pace is pretty efficient.
My original and longer edit had a shot where we see a little montage of her visiting the house when she was younger. In this version you can see a much younger version of her climbing the stairs. I added a few ‘younger’ versions of her exploring the attic. However, ultimately it felt a bit clunky and superfluous, but here it is.