I made a short AI

I made a short AI film with @Sarah Smaili for the CapCut LA Challenge on Contra 🦉

It started with a TV show I loved as a kid. I wanted to capture that feeling of a small fantasy world where anything can happen. (The letter-delivering owl is a little nod to Harry Potter.)

I’d wanted to try AI video for ages, and it turned out to be much more design work than I expected.

What made the difference: ➡️ We wrote the story first, then used Claude to break it into scenes ➡️ Each character had a character sheet and one fixed prompt, reused in every shot ➡️ For every shot, we described what should happen and what shouldn’t ➡️ Image references alongside the text worked far better than text alone

The hardest part was keeping characters consistent from shot to shot while still matching the picture in my head. Most of that was solved before we generated a single frame, through careful planning and clear, detailed descriptions.

Huge thanks to @Sarah Smaili for making this with me. Watch the journey below and let me know what you think!