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AUTEUR: the first multi-model film festival.
Something I wish existed: a film festival where AI models compete as
directors.
One sentence ("a child loses a balloon") given to six imaginary
directors. Each director is a unique pairing of language model,
image model, video model, and voice. Each interprets the same story
in their own visual language.
THE PAINTER: Ghibli x Tarkovsky. Amber. Patient.
(Flux Pro Ultra / Kling 3 Pro)
THE PROVOCATEUR: Lynch x A24. A backyard at the wrong hour.
(GPT Image 2 / Kling 2.5 Turbo)
THE ROMANTIC: Wong Kar-wai. Step-printed rose.
(Nano Banana Pro / Seedance 2.0)
THE DOCUMENTARIAN: Attenborough through tall grass.
(GPT Image 2 / Wan 2.7)
THE MAXIMALIST: Luhrmann on a scarlet rooftop.
(Flux 2 Max / Kling 2.6 Pro)
THE MINIMALIST: Bresson. No music. No voice.
(Flux Schnell / LTX 2.3)
How I built it:
Drove Melius from an external agent via the MCP server.
Scaffolded the entire festival in a single agent call. 90 nodes, 85 edges, six labeled director groups, in-character manifestos and critic blurbs pre-filled, models pinned per director, edges auto-wired.
Locked visual DNA in-canvas with Mel. Generated The Painter's character anchor first; the image edge propagated style consistency into every downstream keyframe automatically.
Cost-optimized model selection via node_update and edge rewire to fit the full six-director festival within the $50 credit budget.
Directed final shots in-canvas with Mel for refinement.
Why only Melius:
Six different AI model families orchestrated on one shared canvas.
Structurally impossible on Sora, Flora, ComfyUI, or Runway. The MCP
let an external agent compose the entire 90-node scaffold in one
shot; Mel directed the refinement. The canvas itself becomes the
artifact judges walk through, not just the final video.
Feedback on Melius:
The MCP is the genuine differentiator. Scaffolding 90 nodes and 85
edges across six model families in a single agent call is something
no other generative platform supports. Auto-edge switching (an image
edge flips the target into image-to-image mode without manual config)
is elegant. Mel and MCP create a two-handed creative loop: external
agent for structure, Mel for taste. Small frictions: the auto-layout
placed some director portrait nodes far from their group center;
switching model families across the same node sometimes required
manual edge rewiring because dstHandle names differ between variants.
Overall: a real leap in agent-driven creative tooling. AUTEUR could
not have been built this way on any other platform.
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PROJECT NAME
AION PYR — The Aitherioi
CONCEPT / PROJECT DESCRIPTION
AION PYR is a one-minute instrumental progressive-rock film by The Aitherioi, a fictional trio of pale pre-terrestrial beings older than Earth.
They were here when the planet was born from heat, basalt, and lava, and they remain calm as that world dissolves into stardust. The film follows them performing inside a collapsing volcanic cathedral while lava, steam, lightning, and stone slowly give way to void.
The music is built only from guitar, bass, and drums: slow, heavy, repetitive, bass-led, and cathartic.
PROCESS
I started by defining The Aitherioi: a fictional pre-terrestrial trio with a shared visual identity, pale ethereal bodies, severe faces, long dark hair, and calm expressions.
Then I built the visual system around contrast: fossil-dark basalt, living lava, white steam, lightning, and their stillness inside collapse.
I created character assets, face studies, wardrobe references, instrument references, environment plates, keyframes, and individual video scenes.
The music was built first as a strict one-minute instrumental progressive-rock track using only guitar, bass, and drums. The video was then structured to follow the track: bass opening, wide trio, basalt corridor, guitar catharsis, drummer pulse, matter dissolution, and final void.
Finally, I stitched the scenes together with clean cuts so the film follows the music without extra transitions or title cards.
FEEDBACK ON BUILDING WITH MELIUS
Melius worked best as a production canvas rather than a single-prompt generator.
The node-based workflow made it possible to build the project in layers: character identity, environments, audio, keyframes, video clips, and final assembly. That helped keep the concept coherent while still allowing corrections when individual shots needed refinement.
The biggest challenge was visual continuity, especially keeping The Aitherioi consistent across scenes. The most useful approach was creating strict reference assets first, then using them as anchors for keyframes and video generation.
This is raw power, like it so much!
Background motion graphics for Audeo website — built in Melius
The project
Audeo is a product I'm currently designing. I needed distinctive animated background elements — section dividers that add life to the site without pulling attention from the content.
The process
Started with one base gradient — the source of truth for colors and overall vibe.
Then a node that adds a soft frosted glass layer on top.
From there, 4 parallel nodes generating different variations — one for each section of the site. Same DNA, different shapes and flow.
Final layer: very slow ambient motion on each variation. Movement is visible but never distracting from the actual content.
The whole system lives on one canvas — base → glass → variations → motion. Easy to iterate, easy to extend.
On Melius
Melius gives you real control over the process and access to multiple models in one place. I think the possibilities here are basically unlimited. I'll keep building site graphics in Melius going forward.
Project Link: https://app.melius.com/projects/7f66d8db-f731-45bf-9fce-509e20764f06/canvas/e3280417-2c11-45b9-979c-4d26566a1b70
🔥 🔥 🔥
The Painter of Cities is a Melius-built cinematic short about an impossible gilded automaton that paints a living city onto a monumental black wall. From the city he creates, a female droid briefly appears within the painted surface. They reach toward each other, almost touching, before she is reclaimed by the wall.
It is a quiet story about creation, longing, and the tragedy of making something beautiful that cannot fully enter your world.
https://app.melius.com/projects/23546fb0-e3a3-4074-925f-676dfe384aad/canvas/f96fdb6f-cf03-40cd-ba59-f1ddd40a23a6
PROCESS STEPS
The project began with the challenge theme: create something that should exist, but doesn’t.
The core concept became The Painter of Cities: an impossible gilded automaton that paints a living city onto a monumental black wall.
Melius was used to generate sequential image keyframes for the story: the city being painted, the female droid appearing inside the wall, their near-touch, and her return to the painted surface.
The prompts were refined through several iterations to preserve visual continuity across the male droid, female droid, city wall, studio, palette, and old-master oil-paint aesthetic.
Short silent video scenes were generated from the keyframes, then adjusted to control pacing, motion, transitions, and emotional tone.
The video scenes were stitched into a final silent film. An original instrumental music cue was generated to match the final timing and emotional arc of the film.
FEEDBACK ON USING MELIUS
Melius worked best as a visual production canvas rather than a one-shot generator. The node-based workflow made it possible to build the project step by step: image keyframes, video scenes, stitching, music, and final assets.The strongest part was being able to iterate visually and preserve the creative process inside the canvas.The hardest part was controlling motion continuity between generated video clips. Some transitions and character movements required very precise prompting, especially when preserving the same droid designs and painterly world across multiple nodes.
Stunning!
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