NOOR

I love history.

Learning how we got from the earliest sparks of civilization to the world we live in now. While reading some Wikipedia article, I came across a fact that stuck with me:

Afghanistan is the only country in the world that doesn’t allow girls to attend higher education.

And according to the Malala Foundation, more than 122 million girls worldwide are currently out of school. For a project centered on light, knowledge, and the idea of “carrying the torch,” that hit hard.

That’s why the main character became a girl in a rural village dreaming of bringing solar power to her community. It felt right — not because it’s symbolic, but because it’s grounded in the reality that millions of girls still don’t get the chance to learn, innovate, or even imagine a different future. If the film ends up winning any prize money, I plan to donate part of it towards girls' education.

On the technical side, this film was an experiment.

I created everything using Google Nano Banana for the images and Google Veo 3.1 for the video.

Figuring out how to keep the characters and sets consistent was a learning curve and a lot of manual work, but also a lot of fun. One of the strangest and coolest moments was hearing the model generate dialogue in languages like Ancient Greek, Navajo and Dari. Somehow that made the whole thing feel connected to the long thread of human history.

The main challenges were figuring out the right tone and learning how to communicate something big without losing the emotional connection to the main character. I rewrote the script dozens of times. Sometimes it was too abstract, sometimes too direct, sometimes too “AI-sounding” — ironically.

Originally, a big chunk of the film — almost a quarter of it — was focused on famous historical achievements and technological milestones. But after showing early drafts to a few people, I realized it wasn’t landing the way I hoped. So I deleted the entire section and rebuilt the film around a more personal, human thread. A lot of hours down the drain but only fitting with the project's statement about progress.

In the end, this film became a mix of all the things that inspire me: history, storytelling, technology, and the belief that progress isn’t something abstract — it’s built by people, often quietly, often against the odds.

Built With

• adobe
• google
• nanobanana
• veo