Case 02Short film, vertical
9:16 · 44s15 shots · deadpan
First Contact
Three women run a field survey in an ordinary backyard — full protocol, full seriousness. Nothing is explained. No one winks. Then the door opens.
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Three women run a field survey in an ordinary backyard — full protocol, full seriousness. Nothing is explained. No one winks. Then the door opens.
Vertical short, 9:16
44s · 15 shots
7 days · not full-time
SGflux portfolio
Three elderly women run a field survey in a suburban garden — full protocol, full seriousness, until the door opens.
The film runs on two grammars and doesn't mix them within a shot. Most of it moves with the women — low, dutch-tilted, urgent, refusing to look down on them. A smaller set — object details, symmetrical two-shots, and the reveal itself, the carer in the doorway — holds level and static instead.
“Noted.”
Brenda's answer to everything — a soil sample, a strange atmosphere reading, a ceramic structure of unclear purpose. The word never changes, and neither does the flatness it's delivered with. Deadpan is played straight through; no one performs for a laugh, including the direction.
It's the rhythm the whole film runs on, right up until the beat that ends it: a whispered "Life form," then a radio call — "Mission suspended."
This is where most AI-generated series fall apart: generate the same character twice and get two different people. Each woman was built as a Midjourney seed first, then recreated in Nano Banana — staying close to the original — as a locked front reference before a single field shot went into production.
Lily in orange, Brenda in mint and pink, Molly in off-white. Nothing was generated until the anchor existed.
A simple premise, but landing the exact absurdity of it — the right kneel, the right foil rocket, the right deadpan stare — took volume. Generating is cheap. Choosing which grandmother blinked right is the craft.
57 of those 818 stills were real composition candidates, shot in Nano Banana Pro. The rest were framing and angle tests in Nano Banana 2.5 — working out the kneel, the tilt, the exact framing, before committing to a final render.
The lines took several passes to land.Dialogue rendered in ElevenLabs V3, scene by scene
Dialogue was rendered in ElevenLabs V3, with each line carrying its own direction — curious, deadpan, reluctant, whispered — rather than one flat setting across the film.
Landing the final wording took a few passes: several versions of each line were generated and compared before the read matched the deadpan the scene needed.
The idea started as a Midjourney carousel post — a woman in a knitted spacesuit in her own vegetable garden. Turning three of those characters into a moving 15-shot reveal took 7 days. Most of the working time went into test renders: getting the right kneel, the right foil rocket, the right stillness before the reveal.
The twist was never the costume.15 shots, one reveal, no foreshadowing
It was the call.