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

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, Not Finished Yet, film still.

B L U M Q U I S T

Not Finished Yet

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 & Ege Berkina Akdağ, The Hunter, film still.

G I Z E M A K D A Ğ +
E G E B E R K I N A A K D A Ğ

The Hunter

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, Patternson, film still.

D O O P I I D O O

Patternson

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 straightforward 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”.

Veronika Pell / Mindeye, The Regular, film still.

V E R O N I K A P E L L /
M I N D E Y E

The Regular

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, Something Came Over Me, film still.

R E O

Something Came Over Me

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, Scoria, film still.

I N F R A R O U G E

Scoria

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, Crow Bar, film still.

M I K E T E E V E E ’ S V F X +
C R E A T I V E T E A M

Crow Bar

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 participating artists and teams 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.

What the script makes possible

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 ninth artist, Photo: HUMANCENTRIC team

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. MikeTeevee 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 and teams 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.

Films

Explore the eight films at HUMANCENTRIC.

Website

About the artists and teams (A-Z)

Anna Réka Baktay

Anna Réka Baktay is a film director, multimedia artist, and co-founder of the David Szauder Studio. Her work focuses on the intersection of cinematic direction, documentary aesthetics, and generative media, often recontextualising archival narratives. Her collaborative projects and video installations have been presented internationally across film festivals and contemporary art institutions.

Instagram

Blumquist

Blumquist is a filmmaker, electronic musician, and generative artist. His cinematic practice draws on slow cinema, deliberate pacing, and the exploration of liminal spaces. By treating algorithmic anomalies as creative prompts, he creates meditative, dreamlike digital works concerned with perception, memory, and digital identity.

Website

Instagram

David Szauder

David Szauder is a media artist and curator. His practice includes work with a closed, private archive of historical photographs and textiles rather than public internet training data, resulting in digital works centred on memory and archival material. His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Centre Pompidou and the Ludwig Museum and is documented in his monograph Glitches & Glory.

Instagram

DoopiiDoo

DoopiiDoo is an independent digital animator and generative artist whose work examines narrative suspension, visual isolation, and the uncanny. Drawing on mid-century American realism and nocturnal urban landscapes, the artist works with spatial continuity within automated workflows while introducing surreal, hand-assembled disruptions into controlled digital environments.

Instagram

Ege Berkina Akdağ

Ege Berkina Akdağ is an art director, motion designer, and creative technologist working across design, audiovisual production, and prompt-based processes. His collaborative projects include digital installations and time-based work, with a focus on pacing, visual structure, and cross-disciplinary storytelling.

Instagram

Gizem Akdağ

Gizem Akdağ is an architectural designer, illustrator, and generative artist working across brand design, spatial aesthetics, and digital art. Her multidisciplinary practice brings structural design principles together with AI-assisted workflows to construct visual environments. Her projects include the opening visuals for the 2026 German Creative Economy Summit.

Website

Instagram

Infrarouge

Infrarouge is a digital filmmaker and mixed-media artist whose practice centres on tactile textures, organic simulations, and pacing. Working with themes of trauma and memory, the artist uses digital editing and the deliberate degradation of generated frames as part of the image-making process. The work examines the relation between artistic judgment, affect, and automated image synthesis.

Instagram

MikeTeevee

MikeTeevee is a strategic, creative and production partner to brands, solving problems with craft, creativity and curiosity. Working across film, animation, VFX and emerging technologies, the studio brings together creative thinking, production expertise and a global network of talent to make ambitious ideas possible. From digital compositing and motion design to generative AI and new production workflows, technology is part of that creative toolkit, opening up new ways to make, experiment and tell stories while keeping human imagination and taste at the heart of the work. At its core, Mike helps craft ideas into stories that move culture.

Website

REO

REO is a digital artist, director, and CGI designer working across 3D animation, spatial art, and generative AI. His practice focuses on translating visual concepts into cinematic environments and moving-image work. He works across visual effects and emerging media technologies, including collaborative film and design projects.

Instagram

Veronika Pell (Mindeye)

Veronika Pell is a Helsinki-based multidisciplinary artist working with generative AI under the name Mindeye. Her practice spans digital series, video art, and animated short films. She describes her approach as “growing imagery,” creating dreamlike narratives that explore transformation and the boundaries between the natural and the artificial.

Instagram

About the screenwriter

Efthimis Filippou is an acclaimed Greek screenwriter, playwright and author, best known for his long-running collaboration with director Yorgos Lanthimos. He co-wrote Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Kinds of Kindness. His work has won screenplay awards at Cannes and Venice, and The Lobster earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. He has also written extensively for theatre and published several books.