Since a part of my
Zeynep Ekim
Since a part of my identity is shaped by being an independent filmmaker, I wanted to use this challenge to experiment with Flora to create a short AI film for the first time. For this challenge, I selected four distinct pieces from The Met’s collection and woven them into a silent, emotionally charged narrative about unspoken emotions and the sanctuary of a child’s imagination.
Here I present you, Refraction.
I was inspired and reimagined the artworks and objects of Vincent van Gogh’s Oleanders, Caspar David Friedrich’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon, the 5th-century Sasanian Seal with Mounted Warrior and Utagawa Hiroshige’s Hibiscus and Bluebird not as separate museum pieces, but as living extensions of a child's surroundings and inner world. Ultimately, blending four completely different art styles into one seamless visual world and a story.
The setting is inspired by the Oleander painting, as flowers Oleanders are stunningly beautiful, yet famously toxic. Placed in a vase beside her chair, they symbolize the mysterious and injured Girl, still and fragile yet carrying the quiet shadow of a dangerous past. The book from Van Gogh's painting becomes the kid's key to imagination. We never learn who she is to him, and why in that state she accepts to read him his story. Children living through quiet trauma rarely ask for explanations, they observe and build up a world and understanding of the situation themselves.
In his imagination, we see him grow into a young man standing guard over the Girl, a scene directly inspired by the "Two Men Contemplating the Moon". In the boy's mind, he is the one who should shield her and relieve her pain. He envisions himself as this powerful protector simply because he owns a pendant that lets him believe it. Through this glass pendant, reimagined from the 5th-century Sasanian Seal with Mounted Warrior, he believes that giving it to her will make her stay and heal, as if he can rewrite the ending of their story.
I chose to reimagine the ancient seal in glass to carry a quiet metaphor. Glass must endure extreme heat and friction to take form, and though it breaks easily, it holds the rare power to bend light and reshape reality.
We don't know if the Girl finishes the story, or changes its ending but we know that he believes that he is helping her. He still has hope. Pulling the bird from Hiroshige’s woodblock print, I placed it on a bare, twisted branch overlooking the fog. In Eastern art, the bluebird is a bearer of light, peace, and spiritual renewal. Its sudden call across the twilight landscape signals to the child, and to us that suffering is not the end of the story.
I have used Flora for image and video generation, but did the editing and sound design on my own on DaVinci Resolve. For music, I used Schubert’s Ständchen (Serenade) as its a song of intense longing and devotion, the melody translates here into a child’s desperate, quiet wish to shield someone he loves, soothe her pain, and convince her to stay. But also technically, the piece is famously structured around a shifting dialogue between a melancholic minor key and a hopeful major key. This mirrors the dual reality of the film.
By bridging centuries of art history from The Met’s archives into a contemporary digital narrative, my goal was to craft a piece that unites and reinterprets different mediums, era's and stories.
If you made it this far, I would love to hear how you would interpret and think of this film 😊✨
Links to originals ↓
Link to my X post: https://x.com/ekim_ze/status/2096284218376507580?s=20
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Posted Sep 5, 2026
Since a part of my identity is shaped by being an independent filmmaker, I wanted to use this challenge to experiment with Flora to create a short AI film fo...
