The Final Flight

Inspiration

This film was born from a deeply personal experience. Confronted with my father’s cancer diagnosis, I found myself once again with a child’s gaze, searching for a way to outwit death. To that child, the crow appeared as a shadowed creature, an omen of mortality.

What it does

This short film immerses us in the world of a young boy confronted with the inevitable loss of his father. Through his gaze, filled with both innocence and determination, we follow a symbolic quest where reality intertwines with imagination. In his attempt to capture a crow he believes to be the embodiment of death, the boy offers a poetic and unsettling reflection on loss and acceptance. The film’s aesthetic embraces a retro feel, using a format close to 4:3, with carefully crafted imagery that lends a cinematic texture, tinted with shades of green.

How we built it

Use of Mistral to generate image and video prompts. The images were created with Midjourney based on a personal moodboard, then adjusted in Photoshop using Firefly for cleaning or correcting elements, before being upscaled with Magnific. A few additional generations were made with Mystic, totaling 3,700 images generated on Midjourney and 10 images with Mystic v2.5. The videos, meanwhile, were generated with Kling, for a total of 110 videos produced, and the voice-overs were created with Eleven Labs in both French and English. Editing was done in Resolve, with some shots cleaned in After Effects. The final file was upscaled with Topaz.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was creating the image and producing the video with the bird trap. It took several hours in Photoshop and multiple back-and-forths on MidJourney before finally reaching a result close to my vision.