Within Time

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  A clock in the subway station wall

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  The only ones who can see the time traveler

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  A moment in time

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  No two looks are alike

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  A Nouvelle Vague dancer

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  Disappearances are moments in which time becomes visible

Within Time is a short film with which I set out to develop a vision I have of time, through a protagonist who observes what happens around him for decades in a subway station.

This is an original idea from which I wanted to test the editing capabilities of some AI tools, with the intention of making the invisible visible, capturing the constant and imperceptible change of time. With AI, ultimately, I could show what we cannot see. Because, as the protagonist says in a fragment of the short film: “disappearances are the true nature of time, becoming visible for an instant.”

The process involved a large number of iterations, especially in generating images, to ensure that the people and places reflected the different decades I wanted to represent. I primarily used Midjourney, as it's a model that allows for working with diverse aesthetics, experimenting with colors, image grain, lighting, and so on.

Another challenge was capturing the passage of time through the characters' clothing, their hairstyles, and specific details like a brooch. To achieve this, once the images were generated in Midjourney, I edited them with Google Nano Banana, which allowed me to adjust many of these details that didn't always work in the initial generation.

It was with these two models that I was able to build the world I had imagined in that subway station, and trace a timeline based on the details. And that's how I shaped the storyboard.

I created and edited the videos using Kling and Runway Aleph. Simultaneously, I went to various subway stations to film short videos with my cell phone, which I then edited using Runway Aleph as well. It was during this process that the manifestations of time I wanted to depict began to emerge: a woman sitting on a bench reading a book that disappears, two young lovers in a subway car who age but continue to love each other, or a teenager who plays the same song over and over again throughout his life.

As is often the case with AI, there was also room for the unexpected. The image of a child with his balloon or that of a young woman dancing as if she were in a Nouvelle Vague film were products of chance, or of Midjourney or Runway Aleph's free interpretation of the prompts.

During the editing process, I had to pay special attention to the assembly of the videos that represented the same character at different times, to the joining of two spaces at different times that had to be the same.

It was here that I managed to materialize the vision/idea that had sparked my idea: to make visible a process of constant transformation that surrounds us but that we are unable to see from the present.

Built With

• adobepremierepro
• claude
• epidemicsound
• freepik
• googlenanobanana
• kling
• midjourney
• photoshop
• runwayaleph