Vampire Economy

A failed Jazz musician is forced to work as a janitor to feed his daughter, but must fight the undead, when he uncovers that his CEO is an ancient Vampire feeding on the talent of his employees.

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Inspiration

This was a commissioned project by Fairground. The idea was to reimagine the Dracula myth in a way that we have never seen before. We decided to take the archetype of the artist's struggle in the corporate world as an inspiration to tell a story of emancipation from the rat race and the return to the things that really matter.

Challenges we ran into

This was back in May. Veo2 had just come out and produced the best video out there, but still only in t2v workflows. We still had issues with character consistency, which is why we specifically had to prompt for every detail of the characters' appearances. Each character was therefore given a very unique and distinct look that could be easily replicated. At the time it was still very hard to have control over the exact action in the videos. Sometimes the output came out with an action we hadn't prompted for, which ended up being more interesting than what we aimed for. Therefore we went back and changed the dialogue to accomodate for the performance.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our Act1 Lipsync came together really nicely. The director Adrian Daniel Botnariu played out every part by himself and transferred the performances onto the Veo2 outputs. His vast understanding of filmmaking helped him produce a story that still holds up even 7 months after its completion, as evidenced by winning the BEST AI SHORT FILM award during the AI Film Awards in Venice, Italy.

What we learned

A good story and strong characters will always dominate over tool jockeys who only care about producing pretty pictures. Sadly, the social media algorithms care more for the quick dopamine hit, which pretty pictures will fast track. It's hard to get your narrative work seen out there, especially since there's no distribution platforms that actually provide the space in which truly meaningful work can be created.

What's next for Vampire Economy

There is a full short format show concept written out, but we think now is not the time to push this specific project any further. Instead we're focusing all our energy into the production of a 20min scifi short whose narrative and conceptual quality will tower over every other narrative project that was ever created in the AI space.

Built With

  • chatgpt
  • higgsfield
  • kling
  • midjourney
  • runway
  • veo2
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