Ghostwriter in the Shell

Inspiration

Duality of my artist persona: A masked human artist guided by an AI “ghost.” Duality is represented by a the single vertical glowing line in my mask. A Jeremy Chong’s Ghost in the Shell fan art sparked the cyborg-woman concept, reimagined as an original arc about control, escape, and becoming human. The concept of Ghost in the Shell feeds very much into the morality of AI use as an Artist. Visual north star: neon cyberpunk, wet streets, sodium vs cyan lighting, club interiors, reflective glass, slow camera glides.

What it does

Tells a cohesive short story: Me, Aidan Yagu searches a future city for a woman revealed through flashbacks as a proto-form cyborg who escapes a lab and later appears human in a nightclub, dancing free. Demonstrates an early-model, minimal-seed workflow to achieve cinematic continuity and emotional clarity with AI video through Sora by Open Ai when it first launched in Germany and several other EU countries.

How we built it

Tools: Sora for generative video, DaVinci Resolve for edit and light compositing, simple LUTs, subtle grain, restrained vignette. Inputs: 3 carefully chosen seed stills, then a large pool of iterated Sora scene variations per narrative beat. Prompt anchors for continuity: silhouette and wardrobe, Camera grammar: motions in urban environments, lateral glides, slow orbitals in club. Assembly: lock the music master first, cut picture to phrasing and transients, then try to color-match across scenes. All sora output was made in 480p and then rendered through davinci in 1080p.

Challenges we ran into

my mask being as usual the most challenging part to maintain through the generations. Sora will always try to reminagine the part of an actor that is not seen , even if that part was in a previous seed. so it's a constant fight of drift in materials, faces, and lighting continuity. Also warped particles and forms can be seen throughout the video. Also making continues shots with 10sec video clips was an interesting experience

Accomplishments that we're proud of

building a cohesive story and blending the scenes almost naturally through many iterations through Open AIs storyboard feature. The smart addition of looping clips to hide lack of new footage

What we learned

Sora is not so great for frame to motion but very strong in reimagining scenes which can give you a variety of new scenes again you can choose from to branch out main story or b-roll when everything works. The "when" it works is incredibly random. it was a smart move to forget about the credit system and rather have the build they operate now on since you need a lot of generations before you get good seeds you can use.

What's next for Ghostwriter in the Shell

Nothing really, I would've liked to make more content around it but the initial reception due to my small YT channel was great but again very small and the video did not lead to as many new subscribers as i initially hoped. if the video by any chance blows up in the future this may change again. I still believe in the song, as it speaks or should speak to pretty much every AI artist that operates in the music space and I believe in the video, since I think it still holds up incredibly well for what i was working with.

Built With

• davinci-resolve
• flux-schnell
• leonardiai
• sora