Exquisite Corpse

Inspiration

I’ve always been drawn to the Surrealists and their willingness to dive beneath the surface of consciousness and tap into the strange, electric currents that fuel creative genius. That pursuit has always fascinated me: the idea that if you reach deep enough into the unconscious, you might catch hold of something brilliant, raw, or transcendent.

But that same pursuit has a darker pull. When you try to grasp the source of inspiration too tightly, the creative act can twist into obsession. The boundary between creating art and being devoured by the thing forever just out of reach is dangerously thin. Exquisite Corpse emerged from that tension, the way inspiration can nourish, distort, and even devour the artist who chases it too far.

What it does

How I built it

Exquisite Corpse was crafted through a hybrid workflow: digital imagery as raw material for collage, traditional compositing and editing for structure, and sound design shaped through intuitive experimentation to draw the viewer deeper into the descent.

I began with visceral, sensory recollections expressed through poetry, gave them form through generative art, and then extracted the resulting body parts to create the graphic illustration and animation.

Throughout the process, AI acted as both tool and mirror, offering unexpected textures and forms that I sculpted into a coherent psychological spiral.

Challenges I ran into

One of the central challenges was navigating the tension between cohesion and dissolution. The film needed to feel like a descent, a gradual surrender to the subconscious, without losing its internal thread. Working with AI intensified this challenge: its abundance of possibilities can easily pull a piece off-center, tempting the work toward chaos instead of intention.

I had to remain attuned to the emotional logic of the film, shaping each fragment so the surrealism served the story rather than overwhelming it. Another challenge was holding myself back from over-refinement. Because the film examines obsession, I had to resist the very impulse and the urge to polish, distill, or perfect what was meant to feel raw and immediate.

Ultimately, the greatest challenge was learning to trust the emergence of the piece, allowing the unconscious to speak without letting it consume the whole process.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What I learned

This project taught me how slippery the boundary is between creative vision and creative distortion. Working with AI allowed me to tap into a kind of synchronicity that emerges only in the liminal space where pattern recognition meets human intuition.

In building a film about obsession, I found myself reflecting on how creative genius is funneled through the senses, how the pursuit of something intangible reveals itself only in that threshold space. It’s through immediacy, not distillation, that the true essence is captured.

What's next for Exquisite Corpse

Built With

• adobe
• google
• hailou
• kling
• suno