The Last Elixir | AI Short Film

Inspired by Chinese mythology, this AI short explores what would happen if the goddess of the moon's heart got corrupted by loneliness, and caused a plague on earth.

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Inspiration

I was eating breakfast, and tried to come up with an idea for a project I could make for this competition. All of a sudden, it struck me - my history classes had taught me that the "black death" plague from the middle ages actually originated from China, I wanted to do a short featuring images of the moon (I just thought this would look good), but what if I did something even cooler? And made some of the scenes take place ON the moon - the only thing that could make this happen, was Chinese mythology. More specifically, the legend of Chang'e, goddess of the moon. So I spend HOURS (nay, days.) researching the Chinese mythology around these legends, like Chang'e, The Jade Rabbit, Wu Gang, and even the Moon Palace that Chang'e lives in... Everything down to the very jade bottle and "elixir pounding kit" that the Jade Rabbit may have used were he to pound an elixir outside "on-the-go". I went really deep, in trying to portray these myths accurately, and to make everything make sense within my own alternate story taking place long after the moon goddess Chang'e had floated up to the moon and been separated from her husband. Just in case anybody wants to read about the myth, here's a link to an article about the myth of Chang'e.

How I created it

This took MONTHS to make. And I was close to giving up so many times. I needed to learn that dialogue, fills out way more time than one imagines. So had I created the film with the first script I made, its length would probably be 20+ minutes, and I really do not have the budget for that... So I needed to tell a really complex story, in a really short amount of time for its complexity, and that was extremely difficult, to say it flat out... In the beginning, the story didn't even make sense, so I really needed to crank my brain in order to find a storyline that at least made sense on paper... Next, was actually generating the images, and this was actually what took the longest time... For months in my spare time, I would just be generating images after images (fitting to my storyboard), and when it comes to animation styled images, at least from my experience, midjourney is really hard to steer towards getting the images you want...

I made SO many reference images, and generated SO many unusable images, even using nano banana a lot to try and guide midjourney better, and it just took a very long time... But eventually, I was finally done, and the next step was upscaling and generating them into videos. I don't have too much experience with video generators, but I used some of the free trials to access Seedance 1.0 Pro, which I had heard should be really good. It was, but I think my "expectations" for how I wanted the images to move was just way beyond what even state of the art video generators can do today... It didn't turn out how I wanted it to, it became more like "a slideshow"... But, I needed to finish it, and so I edited it all together, voice acted all of the lines myself and then used the elevenlabs AI voice changer (to at least give the short a nice extra human touch), and that was it. My 3 month project was finally done...

Oh, and the whole music soundtrack was actually generated with the ElevenLabs music generator, which was the very first thing I did on the project...

Challenges I ran into

  1. Midjourney generated 90% unusable images for me...
  2. Video generators weren't "good enough" to make my images move like it was a traditional animation.
  3. Getting all the details right and creating as much consistency as possible required heavy use of Nano Banana for generating reference images for midjourney.
  4. My story was very complex, and hard to portray in a short amount of time...

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

First of all, I'm just proud that I managed to finish it. It took a long time, but I didn't give up. Second of all, I'm proud that if you set the video to 1080p and just focus on the images, a lot of them are actually very pretty and interesting. I'm also proud that I managed to put in the effort to voice all the characters myself (with elevenlabs AI voice changer added), since I just feel like this at least makes it feel more "human", and definitely makes for a better experience than had they been purely AI generated for this specific project...

What I learned

Better AI images do not always equal a better AI video... This was the principle I believed at the beginning of this project. You need to make sure that the images you generate are actually compatible with the AI video generators you're going to use, mine wasn't exactly. I had hoped for an AI short film feeling almost like a cutscene from a hi-res unreal engine video game (which I often included in my prompts - which I wrote all by myself btw, no help from LLMs), but instead it turned out more like an animated AI "slideshow" with a story, music, sound effects and voices... It's still cool! But not quite what I had in mind...

Built With

  • capcut
  • elevenlabs
  • midjourney
  • nanobanana
  • seedance-1.0-pro
  • topazlabs
  • veo3
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