Menu
Polly is a Monster is an homage to the great nature documentary films and the filmmakers who make them. When faced with the reality of AI filmmaking, is anything real anymore?
Made entirely by myself, I try and answer the age old question, “Does having a pompous, slightly English sounding voice narrate a film, make it believable?”
Created using several AI platforms, many shortbread cookies, gallons of espresso and an ever increasing electricity bill. For what it is, I’m very proud of this, and had a lot of fun making it. Enjoy.
As most AI users know, token purchasing can get expensive quickly, especially while using multiple platforms. I started out in Midjourney to create the essential stills and beat points for very rough style frames and storyboards. Sometimes I would get a decent frame, but mostly I used the MJ frames for rough layouts.
Then, once I had the beat points of the film sorted, I would take those Midjourney frames over to Nano Banana, Kling 3.0 or Veo 3.1 on Artlist.com. From there i would create higher quality frames, with more involved and descriptive prompts.
Next, I would take those frames to Kling Omni, Veo 3.1, and sometimes Midjourney create movement. This project was mostly created with Kling as Veo was very expensive(however also pretty reliable) and Kling just seemed to be more versatile, even if not quite as realistic. Kling offered a lot of multi camera options for changing views within the same scene which I found very useful.
Once I had all of my shots picked out for a decent edit, I started to work each shot individually in After Effects. I started by removing or covering unwanted artifacts, generating elements to comp in, adding existing elements like vfx stock footage, and other fixes. Then applying a basic color correction and LUT to family all of the shots together. I also dropped in basic audio to test at this stage.
After I rendered out all of my basic comped and fixed clips, I headed over to Adobe Premier for edit. During this stage, laid out final audio. I used Elevenlabs to create the narration and timed the clips to that result. I spent a lot of time at this stage writiing and re-writing, making sure the jokes landed. And testing them on my wife who is the first one to tell me if a joke is stupid or funny. (Tough crowd)I also did a final color pass. The work flow tended to bounce between here and AE for a week or two to dial in the result. Sometimes I had to go back into generation to create pick up shots, however more often than not, much got left on the cutting room floor, as they say.
The last phase of the project was marketing, and submission. I made a couple of trailers from outtakes, the cutting room floor, and a few new assets I created using the same techniques. Polly is currently being considered in 10 or so festivals, and has been made an official selection in the AIZONE festival. While I havent created an official release date, it will be available for all to see this year.
