Leaving Haifa

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  Cover 2

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  Cover 3

Inspiration

I read "Returning to Haifa". A novel by Ghassan Kanafani about the ethnic cleansing of Haifa in 1948. That experience was conveyed from the vantage point of a young couple living in Haifa. The story was written in vivid detail that inspired me to visualize it using AI. A key element of the design was to visualize Haifa from old pictures of the city and integrate them into the story telling.

What it does

In less than 10 minutes, I tell the climatic portion of the story. It is then followed by a slide show that shows old black and white pictures of Haifa and how color was added to them and how they were upscaled to be utilized in the film. The person watching the film should come out with a good idea about what the author wanted to convey to the reader, which is the story of a couple that was tragically ethnically cleansed from Haifa.

How we built it

I utilized openart.ai, which is a suite of AI tools that helps in generating pictures and videos. The dialogue was generated using ElevenLabs and some of the music and sound effects were taken from the royalty free pixabay platform. The scenes were created using video prompts. The maximum length of each scene was 10 seconds. Scenes were stitched together to convey the story. Sound effects such as explosions, foot steps, pigeon wings fluttering were added manually in iMovie.

Challenges we ran into

Prompt engineering was a challenge as well as convincing the characters to do everyday mandane tasks such as opening a door and walking through it, getting out of a vehicle or standing ground through a stampede. This process took a lot of trials to understand what the tools can take and create the intended scenes.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The fact that I was able to create this short film in a period of a month and publish it on social media and youtube gave me tremendous pride.

What we learned

Learning with AI tools to generate art that is intentional is not an easy task. I joined communities and I have been taking tutorials to learn the process better. I learned how to use AI tools and AI chat programs such as chatGPT and deepseek to create the scenes and the camera angles since I do not have a background in film making.

What's next for Leaving Haifa

There is another story within the same novel that I will embark on delivering. I might go with the title, "This was my home" which is a story of another character that was forced to leave his house in Jaffa in 1948. I also would like to work on a sequel for Leaving Haifa since it ended with a cliff hanger.

Built With

• elevenlabs
• imovie
• klingai
• openart.ai
• pixabay