Phoenix

Self-driven · 2025 · AI · via Luke Allen

A self-driven AI short film: every frame AI-generated, every interface, HUD and logo designed by hand, made to push how far AI video and image generation could go, and to tell a story I’d had in mind.

Introduction

Phoenix is a short film I set out to make myself. I wanted to explore the capabilities of AI video and AI image generation, tell a story I’d had in mind, and get into areas of design I hadn’t really had the chance to delve into. It was a self-driven project, made over about six months in 2025, all of it my own work.

Tell a full, cinematic story almost entirely through generated film (every location, character and costume AI-generated) layered with a complete set of hand-designed diegetic graphics. And, in doing it, map exactly where AI generation is and where it’s going.

Challenges overcome

The hardest part was the moving target. Over six months, every month the AI tools moved on, so I’d redo work and start again as they got more capable, especially with video. Camera movement was the real constraint: the tools then were far less capable of it than today’s, which is exactly why the film research mattered so much. And there was no obvious finish line: no definitive way to know when enough was enough. I judged it done when I could tell the full story visually, with every single layer applied.

Strategic thinking & planning

The film has two sides. Everything you see in-world (the locations, the character, the costumes) was prompted and then refined across thousands of images until the right one emerged; that image was then used to generate video, with direction, at a point when the AI video tools were just getting seriously capable. The other side is all designed by hand: the graphical user interfaces, the head-up displays, the news-network logos, and the logos for the Vanguard. Audio was sourced and downloaded, some voiceovers created with ElevenLabs and the news reporter with HeyGen. Every AI tool I used is credited at the end. To train both my own eye and the AI’s, I researched cinematically on ShotDeck and drew on the films that inspired this (Children of Men, The Road, Oblivion and I Am Legend), watching them back and recording the exact camera movements and themes so I could remix them into a recognisable tone.

Outcomes

The short film did exactly what I set out to do. It tells the narrative I wanted, and I think the design I achieved by hand sits at a high level alongside it. More than the film itself, the project let me really understand where AI is, where it’s going, and the speed at which it all moves. The ending is deliberately a beginning: the end of this short film is the start of the larger story I’d envisaged, and I hope to extend Phoenix so that this becomes the prequel, and everything picks up from where I wanted it to start.