Summer Dream of the Giants

Inspiration

The project emerges from my long-standing fascination with Borges’s The Circular Ruins, in which the creator and the created become indistinguishable—a recursive structure that blurs the border between dream and reality. Blanchot’s reflections on the “other night” further shaped my thinking: a space where certainty dissolves and perception becomes porous. Having repeatedly dreamt of double-headed elephants since childhood, I began questioning whether reality might itself be the residue of someone else’s dream, and how cinema could stage this instability within layered illusions.

What it does

Summer Dream of the Giants is an AI-generated short film and conceptual visual experiment. Through a stream-of-consciousness structure, it lets the viewer drift between multiple tiers of hallucination and reality, following a lone figure searching for the woman in an elephant mask. The film tests how narrative and vision shift when the dream is no longer the unconscious, but the only place where truth survives.

How we built it

The project was developed through iterative AI visual experiments, scriptwriting, and shot-by-shot prompt design. I created storyboards, extracted semantic keywords, and built a structured prompt architecture to guide character behavior, spatial rhythms, and transitions between dream layers. This workflow allowed the film’s logic and atmosphere to emerge organically from both text and generated imagery.

Challenges we ran into

The primary difficulties involved controlling AI-generated footage—especially shot composition, emotional nuance in micro-expressions, and sustaining coherent atmosphere across scenes. Aligning multi-layered narrative logic with consistent visual tone was also a central challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The project successfully articulates a complete story within a recursive, multi-line narrative structure while maintaining clarity and emotional continuity. I achieved the visual tone and dreamlike atmosphere I initially envisioned and clarified the protagonist’s psychological throughline across shifting realities.

What we learned

Designing prompts—choosing keywords, structuring sentences, and orchestrating visual logic—mirrored the communication process between directors, cinematographers, and production teams in traditional filmmaking. AI outputs, in turn, generated unexpected imagery that expanded my understanding of cinematic possibilities and influenced the later stages of narrative design.

What's next for Summer Dream of the Giants

The next phase will push the project toward a more polished short film, expanding its visual grammar, refining character presence, and developing a deeper architecture of dream-within-dream logic. I plan to integrate live-action footage, AI-assisted VFX, or a hybrid VR/film experience that allows audiences to move through the layered dreamscapes themselves.

Built With

• eleventhlab
• kling
• veo
• vidu