Humancentric

A man enters a bar in a wet trench coat and asks for Peterson. The barman addresses him as Lieutenant, says Peterson killed his wife and four children, and orders him out. The man threatens to return. Once he has gone, the barman calls him a piece of trash.

This compelling scene, written by Oscar-nominated screenwriter Efthimis Filippou, was brought to life through HUMANCENTRIC, a project conceived, curated and produced by MikeTeevee. Eight artists and teams using AI in their filmmaking were invited to interpret it in their own way. The characters, setting, genre and visual world were theirs to decide. Only the dialogue had to remain as written.

The script gives the filmmakers plenty to work with and almost nothing to rely on. The barman’s account is the only history we hear. We do not know who Peterson is, whether the Lieutenant believes him or why the barman appears to hate a man whose family has been killed. Each artist had to decide which of those questions mattered, and whether the film should answer it at all.

Blumquist: Unfinished narratives

BLUR Photo Credit: You-Wei Chen

Blumquist initially created what the scene seemed to invite: a dark, atmospheric noir film. It was nearly finished when the artist was encouraged to move further towards the strange, unsettled worlds and characteristics of their work. The result, Not Finished Yet, takes the script’s lack of context literally. Its protagonist moves through a limbo of unfinished stories, becoming a character as other people address him and pull him into their scenes. Somewhere beyond his world, a writer may still be deciding what happens next.

That premise changed how Blumquist worked with AI. An unexpected figure or visual detail did not always need to be corrected; it could suggest another direction for a film about stories still finding their form. Yet accepting an accident required judgment. As Blumquist explains: “AI can generate an image, but it doesn’t tell you which image deserves to exist, how long to look at it, or why a ridiculous moment should suddenly feel sad.”

Gizem Akdağ and Ege Berkina Akdağ: A story before the scene

BLUR Photo Credit: You-Wei Chen

Gizem Akdağ and Ege Berkina Akdağ made a different decision about what Filippou had left unwritten. They wanted to understand what might have happened before the Lieutenant entered the bar. Why would Peterson kill his family? Why would the barman respond with such hostility? Their film, The Hunter, develops the possibility that Peterson meant to take revenge on the Lieutenant and that the deaths of his wife and children were a devastating consequence of that attempt.

The pair built their film towards the shared scene, rather than beginning there. They wanted the audience to know the Lieutenant as a vulnerable person before hearing him dismissed as a washed-up drunk. Their visual experiments with AI sometimes produced expressions, lighting and details they had not requested. When those results made a moment feel more emotionally convincing, they incorporated them. The scene Filippou wrote remained intact, but the story preceding it changed what the encounter could mean.

DoopiiDoo: Keeping the mystery open

BLUR Photo Credit: You-Wei Chen

DoopiiDoo also began by trying to understand Peterson. Perhaps he was the barman, the Lieutenant himself, or someone concealed in his past. But the artist soon realised that each proposed explanation diminished the tension that had drawn them to the script in the first place. In Patternson, the point is to remain with the uncertainty.

DoopiiDoo wanted viewers to share the experience of searching the scene for a clue, without being assured that one exists.

The artist drew on Edward Hopper’s empty nighttime spaces and the feeling of looking through a window at a moment suspended in time. That atmosphere required a carefully planned setting. DoopiiDoo worked out the bar’s exterior and interior so the space would remain consistent from different camera angles, something AI-generated shots did not readily maintain. If a bench appeared outside the window, it needed to exist logically when the view changed.

During production, DoopiiDoo felt the film was becoming too straight forward and serious for the emotional strangeness they wanted. A scene involving a seagull-lieutenant, a dance and a rifle followed. Rather than solving the mystery, it deliberately disrupts the film’s stability, arriving, as DoopiiDoo describes it, “almost like an intrusion of memory”.

Anna Réka and David Szauder: A world beneath the dialogue

BLUR Photo Credit: You-Wei Chen

Anna Réka and David Szauder kept the conversation in a bar too, though for them the scene suggested that one world might conceal another. Their film, Ladder, develops contrasting black-and-white realities around the dialogue. They describe wanting to build a distinct universe in which the conversation could shift and reveal itself differently, rather than simply illustrate what the characters say.

Their account of the process begins before any AI-generated image. They closed their eyes and imagined the characters, light, environment, smells and noises of the place. From there came the visual world and storyboard. AI helped them give that world form, but, as they put it, the story had already begun to take shape internally.

Veronika Pell: Judgment turned inward

BLUR Photo Credit: You-Wei Chen

Veronika Pell, working as Mindeye, found another story beneath the words. She imagined the man who entered the bar being watched by a female presence, someone whose attention made his anger feel less secure. As she developed The Regular, that presence grew into an audience of women and dark, theatrical figures. Pell also made the bartender a woman, a decision that helped her understand the whole exchange as part of the man’s inner struggle.

For Pell, the bar is a place where he approaches an uncomfortable truth about himself, then retreats from it. A line she could not change became unexpectedly important to that idea. When the bartender says, “piece of trash”, Pell found the delivery so intimate that it sounded almost like his own voice judging him. She had not planned the moment that way but recognised its place in the film.

Some of the restrictions Pell encountered while working with AI tools made filmmaking difficult, though finding a way around these obstacles occasionally led her to an idea she would not otherwise have had. Her experience resists an easy account of the technology as either an effortless creative aid or simply a barrier.

REO: Noir, interrupted

BLUR Photo Credit: You-Wei Chen

REO saw a detective story in Filippou’s scene. Something Came Over Me draws on black-and-white noir and early Alfred Hitchcock Presents, beginning in a grounded world before allowing the surreal to emerge. REO designed details that might register differently on a second or third viewing, giving the audience clues to notice without announcing them.

The production posed a less mysterious problem when REO tried to show one character punching another. The action would not look convincing, despite repeated attempts with AI. REO found another way to communicate that the punch had happened and preferred it to the original plan. The workaround changed the storytelling because the tool could not deliver the shot the artist had imagined.

REO also used AI to make the film’s music, looking for a sound that belonged to its chosen era. For the artist, these tools offered a way to make a story in a visual and sonic world that might otherwise have required a larger team.

Infrarouge: Weather as inner state

Infrarouge’s way into the script was neither Peterson nor the crime, but a detail in the opening description: “His trench coat is wet; his hat is too.” The artist saw a man who arrived already affected by something outside the bar. In Scoria, rain, cold light and mineral textures become the means of conveying that condition. The title refers to a volcanic rock; Infrarouge describes its significance to the film as “trauma cooled into matter”.

The artist wrote extensive notes before generating images, questioning the rain, the violence of the dialogue and the repeated search for Peterson. A storyboard then set out the film’s rhythm. Infrarouge was not trying to present a coma or a moment between life and death as a riddle for viewers to solve. Those possibilities informed the sensation the film was intended to create: a body still reacting, in a world that might be outside him or inside him.

For Infrarouge, editing was where the generated material became a film. An image might be cut, slowed, damaged or held longer according to what it made the viewer feel. The artist is clear about the distinction. “The machine can generate an image, but it cannot recognize a wound,” says Infrarouge.

MikeTeevee’s VFX + creative team: Grief made literal

BLUR Photo Credit: You-Wei Chen

MikeTeevee’s VFX and creative team made the eighth film, Crow Bar. They turned the scene into a surreal music video set in an afterlife bar. The Lieutenant walks in carrying his own rain cloud, while nobody around him finds it remarkable. His drinking floods the space; the Grim Reaper offers consolation. Christian Holland says their guiding idea was to treat these impossible events as entirely ordinary. "Everything the script keeps vague, we made physical. His grief is weather, his drinking floods the room, and death is just a guy at the end of the bar who buys you a drink."

That tone demanded considerable control. The team planned its characters, setting and visual style, then generated individual elements rather than relying on successive AI edits to preserve them. Much of the film was assembled by hand in Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere. “Restraint isn’t something you can prompt for,” Holland says. The work involved rejecting effects and details that were impressive in themselves but wrong for the film.

The eight artists did not simply select different looks for the same scene. They disagreed about where its story lived. For Gizem Akdağ and Ege Berkina Akdağ, it lay in events before the Lieutenant reached the bar. For Pell, it lay in his response to judgment. DoopiiDoo found that supplying a backstory would sacrifice the feeling that made the scene compelling in the first place. Those differences are visible in what each artist asked AI to help make, what each kept from its unexpected results and what each refused.

Final reflections

Filippou says that when he started writing scripts, he was annoyed when a finished film had little to do with what he had pictured. He now considers that departure “the best thing that can happen to a script”. In HUMANCENTRIC, the departure happens eight times.

The artist wrote extensive notes before generating images, questioning the rain, the violence of the dialogue and the repeated search for Peterson. A storyboard then set out the film’s rhythm. Infrarouge was not trying to present a coma ora moment between life and death as a riddle for viewers to solve. Those possibilities informed the sensation the film was intended to create: a body still reacting, in a world that might be outside him or inside him.

MikeTeevee extended the experiment into the way the films were shown. At the project’s first immersive installation, presented at AI on the Lot in Los Angeles, visitors spun a Wheel of Fortune to select one of the eight films, then entered a curtained booth to watch it. Mike Teevee calls the installation a ninth artist: the viewer’s encounter with the work becomes another choice about how its story unfolds.

Every film retains the Lieutenant’s question: “You know a Peterson?” None provides the definitive answer, nor cancels out any of the other seven interpretations. Together, they demonstrate the extraordinary distance eight artists can travel from the same few lines of dialogue, and how much of a story exists not in the words themselves, but in the choices made around them.

With works by
Anna Réka Baktay & David Szauder · Blumquist · DoopiiDoo · Gizem Akdağ & Ege Berkina Akdağ · Infrarouge · MikeTeevee’s VFX & Creative Team · REO · Veronika Pell / Mindeye

With works by
Anna Réka Baktay & David Szauder · Blumquist · DoopiiDoo · Gizem Akdağ & Ege Berkina Akdağ · Infrarouge · MikeTeevee’s VFX & Creative Team · REO · Veronika Pell / Mindeye

Image credit: Anna

Anna Réka and David Szauder

Anna Réka Baktay and David Szauder create immersive visual worlds across AI image-making, moving image, installation, and live visuals. Their work combines familiar cultural references with fictional architecture, stylised figures, and shifting digital environments. They use artificial intelligence to test how collective memory can be translated into unstable, cinematic scenes. The resulting works move between nostalgia, spectacle, and visions of an imagined near future.

Website

Image credit:

Blumquist

Blumquist works across experimental music, filmmaking, and AI-generated visual art. His images draw on nostalgia, horror, kitsch, and pop-cultural fragments to create unsettling fictional spaces. Rather than presenting seamless synthetic worlds, the practice makes room for awkwardness, rupture, and visual disorientation. Each work treats generated imagery as a site where memory, violence, and desire can collide.

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DoopiiDoo

DoopiiDoo uses artificial intelligence to build stylised scenes populated by unusual characters, extravagant fashion, and altered interiors. The work often combines glossy surfaces with absurd details, producing images that are playful and slightly uncanny at once. Through this visual language, familiar ideas of beauty, luxury, and identity become exaggerated and reconfigured. The practice embraces AI’s capacity for excess, surprise, and imaginative transformation.

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Gizem Akdağ & Ege Berkina Akdağ
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Gizem Akdağ and Ege Berkina Akdağ explore the relation between design, visual culture, and emerging image technologies. Their practice treats patterns, materials, objects, and environments as starting points for speculative world-building. AI serves as a tool for creating unexpected visual associations, rather than simply reproducing established aesthetics. Their work proposes new digital spaces where the decorative, architectural, and imaginary overlap.

Website

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Infrarouge
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Infrarouge works with photography and artificial intelligence to construct dense, psychologically charged images. The practice breaks down familiar visual material—memories, portraits, cultural icons, and photographic conventions—and reassembles it into surreal scenes. These works are compelling because they remain close to recognisable reality while subtly disturbing it. AI becomes a method for examining how images shape memory, identity, and emotional experience.

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MikeTeevee’s VFX & Creative Team

MikeTeevee’s VFX and creative team works across visual effects, animation, and digitally expanded storytelling. Their projects use compositing, motion design, simulation, and AI-assisted processes to transform ideas into rich visual sequences. Technical precision is combined with a strong interest in atmosphere, pacing, and visual impact. The team’s work shows how contemporary VFX can operate as both a production tool and a form of world-building.

Website

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REO
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REO explores the language of AI-generated imagery through carefully staged, cinematic compositions. The practice brings together contemporary fashion, internet visual culture, and fictional scenarios that feel both polished and unfamiliar. Rather than using AI to imitate reality, REO treats it as a way to distort perspective, atmosphere, and narrative. The resulting images create a space between editorial image-making, dream logic, and speculative fiction.

Instagram

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Veronica Pell (Mindeye)

Veronika Pell / Mindeye
Working as Mindeye, Veronika Pell creates AI-driven images, video works, and digital narratives that inhabit a space between sweetness and unease. Her practice uses expressive colour, stylised figures, and dreamlike transformations to build emotionally charged visual worlds. She is interested in the ways synthetic images can make private feelings, fantasies, and fears visible. The works retain an intentionally unstable quality, where playfulness and darkness constantly overlap.

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About the screenwriter

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About Efthimis Filippou

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Same Words, Different Worlds: Eight Artists Reimagine a Script by Efthimis Filippou