AI Video: A storytelling experiment in 19 cinematic moments
This 8-second video introduces Freya and Hersch—two uncanny children drawn from the misty edge of an ancient woodland pond. If I could cast young actors to play them, these would be my choices. But I haven’t cast them. I’ve generated them.
This project started as a short story, one I once adapted into a short film shot overnight in a school swimming pool. It has since grown—into a novella, into illustrated scenes, and now into something stranger and more ambitious: a narrative told in 19 AI-generated video clips, each only 8 seconds long.
I’m using emerging AI tools—not to replace storytelling, but to enhance it, to explore what’s possible when the boundary between writing and filmmaking begins to blur. These clips are my storyboard, my set design, my proof of concept.
In the story, Freya and Hersch are adopted by a young couple after appearing at a forest pond. They begin to adapt to human life, even joining a local swimming club. What begins as a quiet miracle becomes something more controversial when Freya beats the World Record for the 200m Butterfly. The world notices. And it all begins to unravel.
I love filmmaking as a process—the planning, the timing, the improvisation. But for now, that’s out of reach. This—AI video, still imagery, sound design—is a way to keep telling stories I care about in the meantime. Freya and Hersch aren’t effects. They’re characters I’ve lived with for years. Now they’re finally surfacing.
This is just the beginning.
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