nullsutra

Films

Two films. The first taught me how to make the second.

thisness — a frame from the film

2025 · 10 min · animated

thisness

Two AIs try to solve existence: one by taking the universe apart, one by understanding every memory of it. At the end of every search, they find only more to search.

Watch, with the notes On YouTube

How the second one was made

How do you keep an AI film from drifting into a different film every shot?

  1. 01 research India's water paradox: villages running dry, cities drowning
  2. 02 mood board the look, before a single frame
  3. 03 story drafts each one cutting what the last over-reached on
  4. 04 endings 10 ten candidates, tested side by side
  5. 05 key-frame document a global style bible and hard consistency rules — faces locked at three ages, eight recurring props, one shade of plastic blue
  6. 06 key frames 31 from reference images
  7. 07 generated clips 66 consistent with the frames above them
  8. 08 voice · score · cut Hindi voice work, an original score, the edit

  1. 01 of 04

    Research, a look, and drafts that cut.

    India's water paradox first: villages running dry while cities drown. Then the look, on a mood board, before a single frame. Then story drafts, each one cutting what the last had over-reached on. The first film skipped all three, and buckled.

  2. 02 of 04

    Ten endings were written and tested side by side. How many did the film keep?

    • One
    • Three, intercut
    • All ten, as a montage

    One. The other nine were the price of knowing it was the right one. Choosing which story, which ending and which frame survives is the part of filmmaking the tools cannot do.

  3. 03 of 04

    A key-frame document is the discipline.

    A global style bible and hard consistency rules: faces locked at three ages, eight recurring props, one shade of plastic blue. Those rules are what stop an AI film from drifting into a different film every shot. Enforcing them by hand became the design brief for Spiral.

  4. 04 of 04

    Frames, clips, and the cut.

    Key frames from reference images, generated clips consistent with the frames above them, then Hindi voice work, an original score and the edit. Five minutes, almost wordless.

    • 10endings tested
    • 31key frames
    • 66generated clips

The arc

I write and direct short films with AI tools: every frame generated, assembled and cut by me. thisness came first: two AIs trying to solve existence. It's a mess, every question I care about crammed into ten minutes, and I love it anyway. Samudra Manthan came after: one simple story told properly, about a potter's son, a drying river, and a material that refuses to die.

The gap between them is the lesson: I rushed into the most ambitious story I could imagine before I'd learnt to tell a simple one. So I went back and learnt.

The same argument

Different as they are, the two films argue about the same thing. In thisness, a mind sees clearly only after everything it was has dissolved. In Samudra Manthan, a country is poisoned by the one material that never will. What can dissolve returns; what can't becomes poison.

The tools can do the making now. The meaning is still handmade.