Skyforged: Nihon

High above a poisoned Earth, people survive inside a floating city - Nihon. They live between hope and heartbreak, holding on through faith, duty, and the fragile beauty that keeps them human.

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Inspiration

Skyforged: Nihon began with an image and a sentence in my head. And image of green almost flower like structures made of poisonous smoke above clouds. Something both beautiful and deadly at the same time. And the phrase that came to me in my dream: Even if we’ll touch thorns a 1000 times, we’ll still keep our hearts open to bloom

Then a series of “what ifs?”- what if humanity’s last hope wasn’t in space, but still tethered to Earth, hovering just above the mistakes it made? It’s inspired by Japanese philosophy, Mono No Aware (the beauty of impermanence), and classic tales of duty and hope. I wanted to blend Edo-era tradition with sci-fi melancholy - a story about hearts that keep believing, even when the sky is all that’s left.

To stay human - to keep feeling, believing, and remembering beauty, even when the sky is all that’s left. That’s what the Skyforged are learning: people born among clouds, living within a floating city built of metal beneath a glass dome. Their story unfolds through movement and worldbuilding, revealing what it means to hold onto faith and rituals when the natural world has long disappeared.

How we built it

I followed a classical approach - pre-production, production, and post-production - just like a traditional film project. In pre-production, I focused on the story’s emotional core, visual language, and the world’s philosophy.

During production, I developed the characters, environments, and pacing through a mix of cinematic design, visual composition, and layered narrative rhythm - building every shot to feel both painterly and alive. I've generated images and created animation (image to video). At this stage I've also hired Japanese translator to help me with all the dialogues as the movie itself is in Japanese.

Finally, in post-production, I refined color, light, and timing to merge emotion with worldbuilding. I've also added some post effects. Each scene was shaped to feel like a memory - something fragile, poetic, and timeless, as if the story itself were drifting through the sky. At this stage Dmytro (the sound desinger) worked on music and sounds using both AI tools (like elevenlabs and Suno AI) and traditional tools. I've also generated all the voices for the characters and some of the music based on my own piano melodies.

Challenges I ran into

  1. Time constraints One of the biggest challenges was condensing the story into an eight-minute runtime. The world of Skyforged: Nihon is vast and layered, and I wanted the audience to feel the emotional depth of its people and their traditions. Balancing scope, pacing, and clarity within such a short frame pushed me to distill every moment to its essence - choosing emotion over exposition and atmosphere over detail.

  2. Expressing a nation through feeling. I also wanted to convey the spirit of the Skyforged - a fictional race born in the sky - through more than just dialogue or action. The challenge was to capture their identity through imagery, ritual, and philosophy: the way they move, speak, and honor the remnants of a world they never knew. My goal was to let viewers feel their culture before fully understanding it.

What I've learned

Throughout production, I experimented with a wide range of AI tools and techniques, building a flexible creative pipeline that adapted to each stage of the process. Every shot demanded something different - from mood and motion to atmosphere and rhythm - so the challenge was not only in mastering tools, but in understanding how to make them serve emotion and story.

This process taught me that the most powerful results come when technology follows intuition. By treating AI as a creative partner rather than a shortcut, I learned how to keep the human touch alive - balancing structure with improvisation, and efficiency with artistry.

What's next for Skyforged: Nihon

I plan to submit the film to a range of AI film festivals, contests, and creative events around the world to share its story and explore how audiences connect with its world and emotion.

Beyond that, I’d love to expand Skyforged: Nihon into a larger narrative universe potentially.

Built With

  • capcut
  • elevenlabs
  • freepik
  • hailuo
  • kling
  • leonardo.ai
  • luma
  • nano-banana
  • pixverse
  • seedance
  • seedream
  • sora
  • sora2
  • veo3
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