Remember Me

Aria I

Inspiration

I got inspired by the idea of people forgetting who you are. Then having to risk everything to make your loved ones remember you. The entire world is against you, what will you be ready to do so they don't forget forever? I also wanted the challenge of telling a story in a very short amount of time , so I chose the micro-drama category. Made we watch quite a few of them... what a world.

What it does

It starts off a story of betrayal, family and resilience. And some fun future meets past meets dynasties at war.

How we built it

For the first time, I used a node workflow for 95% of the content. With Freepik's new Spaces. It's such an interesting way of creating and visualising AI content, so much better than just regular prompts. My entire story, the bloopers, the evolution of my characters, all are in a Freepik Space.

I also heavily leveraged Claude. Much more as a second brain assistant than usual. The script was a fantastic back and forth where I asked it to be brutally honest with me every step of the way.

The process was: script in Claude, where I got a small description for every single shot required, then used an assistant within Spaces to kickstart some of my image prompts, the rest was a combination of several nodes and tricks.

Finally, with all shots numbered, I took a huge amount of time to generate all the videos. Using a mix of Veo 3.1, Kling 2.5 and a few Hailuo 2.3. Sounds effects were done within the video models and with Elevenlabs. The entire movie was then edited on a potato in Capcut. Straightforward and efficient.

Challenges we ran into

The inconsistency of the models made spreading out the shots between the video models not practical at all. Some shot images also just wouldn't work, so I had to rethink entire sequences. After creating all images, my main character got denied by the models' obscure censorship algorithm, I therefore had to do a last minute "recast". Nothing too complicated, but quite the surprise after all the work done.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Discovering ingredients in Veo 3.1 could create incredible sequences with multiple characters. Creating the music in Suno at the 11th hour was so pleasing. It's an absolute gem of a tool. Finding a storyline that fits with different beats, within 120 sec. Matching my cool songs to those beats. The characters feel like they could be living somewhere, in some galaxy far far away.

What we learned

Don't overestimate the number of shots in a short movie. It makes you create more than you can fit in the time frame or that you need for the story. A lot of sequences got cut, and yet I had spent time crafting the starting frames. For a quick last minute participation to the competition though, I'm satisfied. All in all, what fun it is to create stories. I'll never stop.