Cover image for Hey Contra fam ✿✿✿✿✿ jumping on #contraquest ✿ I’m Mont Carv...

Hey Contra fam ✿✿✿✿✿ jumping on #contraquest ✿ I’m Mont Carver ♡ a Mexico City–born creative based in Madrid. I work across video editing, filmmaking, photography, and AI-assisted visual art (yes, I love a good hybrid workflow ♡). I’m obsessed with story + mood + rhythm ♡ whether it’s a cinematic short-form edit, an actor character study, a beauty campaign BTS, or Midjourney experiments turned into motion ✧₊˚ This year I’m here to collaborate more, learn faster, and make work that feels real and weirdly beautiful ★ Say hi + tell me what you do! ୨୧ #contraquest #freelancerlife #videoeditor #filmmaker #photographer #visualartist #aivisuals #midjourney #madridcreatives

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THE INSATIABLE DESIRE FOR DIVINE LOVE A short film by Mont Carver Original artwork: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/360403 I spent hours moving through The Met’s Open Access collection before encountering Antonius Wierix II’s engraving The insatiable desire for divine love (Divini amoris intensio), created between 1570 and 1604. Among more than half a million works, this was the image that stopped me. The engraving depicts a robed figure holding two hearts connected by fine lines to a crowned heart suspended above him. I was drawn to the way it gives longing a physical structure. It immediately connected with questions that already run through my work: queer love, faith, yearning and the unseen forces that bind people together. The Insatiable Desire for Divine Love reimagines the engraving as a short magical realist film set in present-day Mexico City. A young Mexican woman prays before the image in her bedroom. The engraving awakens and becomes a prophecy. Later, she glimpses a luminous, long-haired figure. The apparition eventually returns in an ordinary human form as the girl living next door, whom she encounters on the rooftop while hanging laundry. The divine revelation is not fulfilled through a distant celestial being, but through another young woman who has been living beside her all along. The film asks whether the love we address through prayer might already exist within the ordinary world, waiting to be recognized. I developed the film through a branching process on the FLORA canvas rather than through a single generation. I began with visual research into Mexican domestic devotional spaces, bedrooms, neighborhoods, rooftops and clotheslines. From there, I developed the two characters and repeatedly refined their appearance, environments, visual continuity and relationship to the original artwork. I explored several interpretations of the apparition, rejecting images that felt overly polished or like generic digital fantasy in favor of something more intimate and slightly uncanny. I also experimented with expanding and animating the original engraving while preserving its recognizable composition. Its engraved clouds begin to drift, the landscape responds to the wind, the hearts pulse and the delicate black lines tremble as though the antique image were awakening inside the paper. Across the film, those connecting lines are translated into the electrical wires and clotheslines of Mexico City. The pastoral landscape becomes a dense urban rooftop, while clouds reappear through white sheets moving in the wind. The final visual language combines the tenderness of a magical-girl story with the texture of 35mm photography, domestic realism, devotional imagery and restrained analog dream effects. The dusty pink bedroom, faded turquoise textiles, warm daylight, black ink and pearlescent light were refined across connected iterations. Sound, music and an ornamental title sequence were developed as part of the same visual world. The project also begins from the idea that some artworks have lives beyond museum walls. Devotional images can travel through reproductions, bedrooms and domestic altars, where they are framed, touched, prayed to and woven into everyday life. I wanted Wierix’s engraving to leave the digital archive and enter a young woman’s bedroom, not as a distant historical object, but as an intimate image she lives with and speaks to. The film therefore traces a circular journey: from devotional print to museum collection, from the archive back into a home, and finally toward the museum again as a contemporary moving image. Rather than simply illustrating the original engraving, the work proposes a new afterlife for it, one in which sacred longing becomes domestic, Mexican and queer. IG post: https://www.instagram.com/reels/Dc-6_KgRaEV/

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memory . zip ♡ an art exhibition at NAVEL the signs, the exchanges and the eyes, and the cities original title: los signos, los intercambios y los ojos, y las ciudades This was my exhibition at NAVEL in Madrid, presented from May 14 to June 28, 2026. A love letter to the home I was leaving after five years, and to the people, rituals and tiny gestures that made it ours. Built from photography, poetry, printed texts and fragmented images, the installation treated the house as more than architecture: the kitchen became a meeting place, the hallways held our exchanges and each bedroom became its own private universe. I cut, enlarged, blurred and reprinted the images on different materials to recreate the way memory behaves: unstable, marked, fading, repeating and always returning in pieces. Part farewell, part visual diary, part attempt to touch something just before it disappears ౨ৎ I love sharing my personal artistic projects alongside my freelance work because I do not see them as separate worlds. They might live in different folders, but they come from the same hard drive ♡ The same curiosity, visual sensitivity and emotional storytelling move through everything I create. Every photograph I make, film I edit, text I write and installation I build shapes the creator I bring to each collaboration. Photography, writing, image manipulation, creative direction + installation by Mont Carver. Exhibited at NAVEL, Madrid.:

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A NORMAL AMOUNT OF SKY My entry for the CapCut Seedance 2.5 Video Challenge. I am interested in creating worlds that exist somewhere between magical realism, liminal spaces, dreams, and quiet unease. Places that initially feel soft or nostalgic, but gradually reveal that their architecture, scale, or internal logic cannot be trusted. For this film, I imagined a girl beginning inside an empty school, a place shaped by repetition, observation, rules, and the pressure to become a recognizable version of yourself. She walks into a faded pastel-pink bathroom and discovers a luminous horse behind a full-length mirror. The horse represents the possibility of escape, freedom, desire, and a life that cannot be completely explained. When she crosses the mirror, the camera crosses with her. She runs alongside the horse through a fluorescent landscape where rain, flowers, institutional ceilings, and an artificial sky coexist. An astronaut eventually leads the horse away. I see the astronaut as a figure already accustomed to surviving unfamiliar worlds, while the girl is encountering one for the first time. As the camera pulls backward, the apparently endless landscape is revealed to exist inside a crystal sphere held by another version of the same girl. She releases the sphere, breaking the boundary around the imagined world. The luminous horse survives in miniature among the fragments. For me, the ending is about carrying a small piece of freedom back into reality. The escape may be fragile, altered, or impossible to preserve at its original scale, but it does not disappear. WORKFLOW I developed the film in CapCut Video Studio using Seedance 2.5. I began with visual references centered on luminous horses, cyan rain, retro astronauts, pastel magical-girl imagery, artificial landscapes, wet reflections, 35mm grain, analog halation, and uncanny institutional architecture. I then created a timestamped 30-second prompt defining the character continuity, camera path, environmental transformations, sound design, and narrative progression. I generated multiple iterations and refined the mirror crossing, the girl’s visibility, the relationship between the horse and astronaut, the macro pullback from the sphere, and the final release of the miniature horse. The final camera path moves continuously from the school corridor into the bathroom, through the full-length mirror, alongside the running girl and horse, outward through the crystal sphere, and down to the fragments on the bedroom floor. Created with CapCut Video Studio and Seedance 2.5.

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Mont Carver

Ethereal Filmmaker | Photographer | Creative Direction | AI