Arya

Inspiration

I've always been fascinated by the ethics of captivity, how we justify keeping intelligent creatures confined while claiming it's for their benefit. I wanted to explore this through a horror lens, where the power dynamic between human and animal could be inverted unexpectedly.

The visual potential of underwater performance combined with AI's ability to create impossible, otherworldly creatures made this the perfect story to tell through AI-generated filmmaking. I was drawn to the idea of a creature that isn't evil, just profoundly lonely, and what desperate measures loneliness might drive an intelligent being to take.

How I built it

ARYA is created entirely with AI tools, embracing the medium's unique capabilities:

Visuals: Midjourney & Dreamina for all image generation, with character-consistent prompting across 100+ shots. Six distinct visual styles were developed - from clinical institutional spaces to creature POV.

Video: Kling AI to animate still images into 5-10 second clips, with specific camera movements and subject motion for each shot.

Audio: ElevenLabs for voiceover narration (~600 words across four acts) sound effects, and an original (non-AI) score.

The film's structure deliberately plays to AI's strengths (impossible visuals, creature design, abstract sequences) while working around its limitations (no lip-sync dialogue, creative framing solutions)

Challenges I ran into

The biggest challenge was maintaining visual consistency across 100+ individually generated images, ensuring Olivia, Mandy, and especially Arya looked consistent across different shots, angles, and lighting conditions. This required meticulous prompt engineering and character reference development.

The creature POV sequence in Act 4 required extensive experimentation to create something legible yet alien, multiple perspectives had to feel disorienting but beautiful, abstract but followable.

Finally, pacing an 8-minute film with AI-generated clips meant carefully planning shot duration and editing rhythm to maintain tension without the spontaneity of traditional footage

Built With

• capcut
• dreamina
• elevenlabs
• kling
• midjourney