Unknown

A young woman with a troubled past lives in constant worry of the presence revealed within reflections and photographs. Though she does all she can to ensure it remains unseen and unknown by her fiancé and anyone else, there are limits to her control.

Keith McDuffee (sole creator and editor)

I completed this film over the course of about two weeks, off and on. I’ve had the script written for years, and I thought I’d take a stab at finally seeing it on-screen.

Interestingly, as a writer, it became evident to me that some of what I wrote just would not translate well to the screen. So I made on-the-fly edits to make more sense of what was going on. It’s far, far from perfect — probably far from “good,” even. But remember: this is the worst this technology is going to be; it’s only going to get better.

As a matter of fact, halfway through creating the film, Veo 3 improved their system to allow for starting images for audio-enabled videos. This made for much more consistent-looking characters, since I could start with the last frame of a previous shot. I was tempted to go back through the older clips to improve them, but I barely had enough credits to get this done as it is.

At some point I will count up how many renders I had to do, but it’s definitely several hundred. I used up the equivalent of two months of credits. Thankfully, Veo 3 Fast (vs. Quality) is what I used for most of the scenes, and that costs much less than Veo 3 Quality.

Some of the scenes were tough to create, especially the scene with “blood” that I clearly had to trick the AI with saying it was “red paint.” Also, anything in and around a shower was, of course, flagged so many times that I lost count.

Though not my original intention, the film evolved into a metaphor exploring the psychological struggles associated with severe body dysmorphia.