Behind “Happy Souls Alive”

Before starting “Happy Souls Alive”, I kept coming back to a simple question:

What makes us feel worthy?

Is it enough to believe in our own value, or do we need other people to believe in it too?

I became interested in the idea that sometimes simply being something is not enough. We look for ways to prove it: that we are successful, interesting, beautiful, brave, talented, or somehow different from everyone else. And once worth needs proof, another question appears:

What are we willing to change about ourselves in order to be believed?

That became the starting point for Happy Souls Alive.

The film takes place in a small town where three travelers return with extraordinary stories about a witch. Each claims to have survived an impossible journey and received an ordinary object from her as proof that they are worthy.

Their stories contradict one another, but it doesn’t really matter. The town believes them.

Soon, everyone wants proof of their own.

They begin bringing strange objects to the local Tailor, asking her to turn them into elaborate garments: physical evidence of beauty, bravery, intelligence, importance, or whatever story they want others to believe.

The more convincing the story becomes, the more visible the person becomes.

And while the Tailor helps everyone else become visible, she slowly disappears into the background.

That contradiction became the heart of the film.

Finding the World

I wanted the story to exist in a lyrical, almost fairy tale world. The desire to be noticed, admired, or somehow separated from everyone else is not something new. People have always looked for ways to communicate who they are, and sometimes who they would like others to believe they are. This was one of the reasons I didn’t want to set the story in the present day. Instead, I placed this feeling somewhere unexpected: a small town in the 1790s.

The world was partly inspired by Grimm fairy tales. I wanted it to feel whimsical and handcrafted, but with something darker underneath. It is a place where everyone is desperately trying to appear different while slowly participating in the exact same behavior.

Once I understood the world, I started looking for the character who could carry the story.

I kept thinking about the Turkish saying, “The tailor cannot sew their own tear.” It describes someone who can help everyone else but somehow cannot do the same for themselves.

That became the foundation of the Tailor. Her hands transform everyone in the town. She puts in the labor, creates the garments, and gives physical form to the stories people want others to believe about them. Yet the work itself remains almost invisible.

The townspeople leave her shop carrying something that seems to say:

I belong here too. I am worthy too.

Meanwhile, the person who made all of it possible stays in the background.

The Tailor wants to be seen as well. At first, she quietly makes something simple for herself: a handmade rose. But when that is not enough to earn her a place among the people she has dressed, she has to make a choice:

Does she remain herself, or does she create the same kind of false proof she has been creating for everyone else?

That became the question driving her transformation.

Directing with AI

One of the things I enjoy about working with AI is that the result does not always arrive exactly as I imagined it.

I might begin with a specific image or camera movement in mind, but sometimes something unexpected appears in the process. A strange composition, an unintended gesture, or a different movement can suggest a direction I had not considered before.

I learned not to reject those moments immediately. Instead, I started asking whether they could make the scene stronger. For me, this does not mean giving up control. The intention of the scene still needs to be clear. I need to know what the character is feeling, what the audience should understand, and what needs to change by the end of the moment. What can stay flexible is how I arrive there.

AI became useful to me not because it made those decisions for me, but because it sometimes gave me unexpected possibilities to choose from.

Production Process and Cinematography

The production took around four to five weeks from start to finish. I began by completing the script, and before generating any final images, I built a visual reference library in Flickpedia. I organized references by color and mood, which helped me understand the world I wanted to create.

I even made a film poster quite early in the process. It wasn’t something I necessarily needed for the final film, but it helped me establish the visual tone. I knew the story needed to feel whimsical, but also dark and slightly unsettling. From there, I locked the overall style and started developing the characters and environments.

One of the biggest challenges was building multiple sets while keeping the world visually consistent. I learned that with AI filmmaking, defining the style clearly from the beginning makes a huge difference. The stronger and more consistent the references are, the easier it becomes to guide different generation tools toward the same visual world.

I also tried to approach the environments more like a production designer rather than treating them simply as backgrounds. The spaces needed to feel appropriate to the period, but they also needed to communicate things that were never directly explained in the script. Color, architecture, lighting, objects, and even the amount of empty space around a character could contribute to what a scene was saying. For me, that became an important part of establishing the emotional and visual tone of the film.

Another part of the process I really enjoyed was experimenting with camera language. Using Flick’s 3D Stage allowed me to explore specific camera angles and movements before generating the final shots. Instead of only describing a camera move in a prompt, I could build a much clearer visual reference for what I wanted.

I’ve included a short tutorial below showing how I used this process for one of the shots in the film.

Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1b7G5tz8AFWfEGC6nm-3zgNvlUN9EFWRs/view?usp=sharing

Also, having color adjustment controls inside the Flick, available within the workflow was also surprisingly useful. Being able to make quick adjustments while working made it easier to keep different shots feeling like they belonged to the same film.

The Hardest Part: Crowds

The biggest technical limitation I encountered was creating crowd scenes. This was difficult in still image generation and especially in video generation. When I gave Seedance a reference image of the Tailor, it often wanted to replicate her throughout the crowd or generate people who looked very similar to her. That became a problem because the story depends on the Tailor feeling visually separate from the townspeople.

I spent much more time creating strong reference frames, controlling character placement, and sometimes simplifying shots before moving into video generation.

Eventually, though, that limitation pushed the film in a stronger direction.

In several scenes, I began using the townspeople as silhouettes rather than fully defined individuals.

At first, this was a technical solution. But it ended up supporting the story much better.

The crowd in Happy Souls Alive was never really about individual people. It represented the pressure surrounding the Tailor, the collective gaze she wants to enter but can never quite become part of.

Making the crowd less individual helped it feel more like a single force. In this case, a production limitation ended up becoming part of the visual language of the film.

Summary

AI made it possible for Happy Souls Alive to become more than an idea I had in my head.

But throughout the process, I tried to make every decision consciously and with intention.

Whenever I approached a scene, I kept asking myself a few simple questions:

Does this scene move the story forward? What is its purpose? Am I revealing something new? What should the audience feel here? Can the framing, composition, or visual language communicate something that dialogue alone cannot?

And after finishing a scene, I would ask one more:

After this moment, has something changed?

For me, the most important part of the process was making sure every choice carried meaning.

AI can add movement, detail, and visual complexity very quickly, and those possibilities will only continue to grow. For me, the interesting part is deciding what to do with those possibilities: why a scene exists, what it makes us feel, and how it serves the story.

What makes a film meaningful is not simply what the technology is capable of producing, but what the person behind it is trying to say and how they choose to say it.

That is also what excites me about AI filmmaking. Everyone can work with similar tools, but the way we observe, make decisions, build meaning, and express an idea will always be different, and if there is something that stays with you, something you are curious about, something you want to question, or simply something you feel the need to express, and you now have the tools to bring it to life, the way it was made starts to feel less important than what you are trying to say with it.

Throughout this project, Flick gave me a space to explore that process and find my own way of expressing the story.