Muainn and the Bubble Elevator

In a quiet seabed, a small world-weary creature rides a bubble elevator that has no buttons, only rising, falling, and bursting, turning everyday emotional ups and downs into a gentle, wordless game.

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Inspiration

Muainn and the Bubble Elevator is a dialogue-free vertical short set in a quiet, slightly surreal underwater world. The background feels like a real seabed — rocks, shafts of light, blue-green depth — but the bubbles themselves are not fully realistic. They sit somewhere between physical bubbles and hand-drawn effects, so they can blend naturally with Muainn’s illustrated texture.

In this film, Muainn is held and carried by these large bubbles. Sometimes the bubble rises like an elevator, sometimes it drifts downwards, and sometimes it bursts unexpectedly. The basic idea extends the core of the Muainn “everyday” series: playing and co-feeling with the natural environment.
This time, the environment is the sea, and the playmate is the bubble. Bubbles are light and cute, yet fragile and uncontrollable. They float, lift, and then suddenly break. It's like small waves of emotion in daily life, quietly rising and crashing. But all of this still happens inside the frame of a “game”: not as a heavy allegory, but as a soft, unstable yet gentle slice of being alive.

What it does

This piece is designed as a single-location, single-action underwater micro film:

  • One character, one undersea space, one pattern of rising and falling
  • No dialogue and no text — only bubbles going up and down, bursting, and Muainn’s tiny reactions

In a vertical, short-form viewing context, the audience simply joins Muainn on the bubbles: drifting upward, suddenly dropping, then being caught again by a new bubble. It feels a bit like a ride, a bit like emotional turbulence, and still like a small game.

Within the larger Muainn universe, this short works as a self-contained fragment of daily life: it does not explain a clear “message,” but lets the body play between sea, bubbles, and gravity, creating a moment that is cute yet not fully safe, soft yet not fully stable.

How we built it

This short started from the environment rather than the character. Because the underwater world is harder to control, I spent a lot of time in the image-generation stage:

  1. Underwater scene generation and refinement

    • I repeatedly used AI image tools to generate seabed scenes, testing different rock shapes, underwater light shafts, and blue-green gradients. The goal was to make the environment feel grounded but not photorealistic.
    • The bubble design deliberately avoids full physical realism, sitting between real-world bubbles and stylized hand-drawn effects, so they can merge naturally with Muainn’s illustrated look.

  2. Concept and composition

    • From the start, I treated the bubbles as elevators, not just decorative effects:
      rising, falling, pausing in mid-water, and bursting are all part of the daily game.
    • In the storyboard, Muainn’s position is kept roughly in the middle of the frame or slightly off-center, so the viewer can focus on the vertical motion of the bubbles and the relative shift between character and environment.

  3. AI video generation and motion selection

    • Using keyframes (inside the bubble, bubble rising, bubble dropping, bursting moments) as anchors, I generated multiple short clips with AI video tools.
    • The selection focused on playful, flowing motion — bubbles should not be completely static, but also should not fly chaotically. Muainn stays within a defined area, gently swaying with the bubbles instead of remaining rigid or being thrown around.

  4. Maintaining character consistency

    • From the large pool of generated clips, I removed any where Muainn turned into a “generic rabbit” or deformed too much. For example, ears become too long, limbs stretch into realism, or changes in face shape.
    • I only kept segments where Muainn preserved their original proportions and expression, while still moving slightly with the bubble.

  5. Upscaling and editorial refinement

    • I upscaled selected clips with AI tools to increase resolution, then brought them back into an editing timeline.
    • In editing, I adjusted framing, added slight “camera movement,” and used a few subtle effects (light bloom, gentle grain) to smooth over instability in the raw generations, making the final sequence feel more coherent and fluid.

Challenges we ran into

  • Balancing a realistic seabed with fantastical bubbles
    If the underwater background looked too realistic, the bubbles felt pasted-on and artificial; if the seabed was too cartoony, the world drifted away from the tone of the main film. Finding the right balance between these two poles was an early and persistent challenge.

  • Maintaining Muainn’s presence while the bubbles move
    When AI handles a character in motion, it often distorts facial details, ears, or body shape, or quietly morphs the creature into a standard rabbit. Keeping Muainn recognizable — while still allowing them to move with the bubbles in an interesting way — required constant generation, rejection, and re-selection.

  • Letting go of overly rigid storyboards
    At first, I became very attached to specific narrative beats or shots (for example, a bubble bursting at a precise height, or a particular transition I imagined in my head). In practice, those ideas repeatedly failed in generation. This project forced me to accept that some “perfect in my head” scenes were simply not viable with the current tools, and that I had to build from what actually worked on screen.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • In just a few seconds, using only bubbles rising, falling, and bursting, we created a daily-life fragment that feels both playful and emotionally unstable , a light mix of poetic philosophy and childlike healing, readable without any dialogue.
  • From a large amount of underwater and character material, we achieved stable Muainn design and engaging bubble motion, so the film plays like a gentle undersea game rather than a demo of visual glitches.
  • By combining AI upscaling with careful reframing, subtle camera moves, and small effects, we turned scattered generated clips into a visually cohesive short that can stand on its own in a vertical format.

What we learned

The most important lesson from this short is that working with AI images requires learning to let go. Some story beats looked beautiful in my head, but simply would not materialize no matter how I tuned prompts or regenerated footage. Insisting on those impossible shots would only drain time and energy at the same failure point.

Once I allowed myself to adjust the concept slightly , for example:

  • Accepting that bubble positions and speeds could differ from the initial plan,
  • Using the higher-resolution material after upscaling to introduce editorial changes in size and framing,
  • Adding small, targeted effects instead of expecting AI to output a flawless final image, the film actually became more complete and more in tune with the overall Muainn aesthetic.

What's next for Muainn and the Bubble Elevator

This short is part of a growing series of Muainn films, both long and short. The longer pieces will continue to develop Muainn’s narrative journeys, while the shorts will keep sharing Muainn’s everyday moments, blending philosophical ideas with poetic environments in small, focused scenes.

Going forward, I plan to:

  • Create more short pieces that expand Muainn’s daily life in different settings, all framed as games of co-feeling with nature.
  • Gradually open up a new, slightly fantastical universe where this creature may even meet other beings, allowing for light, yet emotionally deep encounters.
  • Offer, through these short vertical films, a gentle space of warmth and reflection for an age of information overload and frayed understanding, and a small pocket of time where viewers can pause, breathe, and feel accompanied.

Built With

  • elevenlabs
  • freepik
  • kling
  • photoshop
  • premiere
  • seedance
  • topazlabs
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