Viy.
- Type
- AI-generated film
- Year
- 2026
- Length
- 0:10
- Format
- 16:9
- Made with
- Higgsfield
About the project
Girls in linen dresses and daisy crowns circle through the mist, singing. It is beautiful, calm, almost hypnotic. Ten seconds is all it takes for that to change.
The idea
I have always been drawn to Slavic folklore, and to Gogol's Viy above all: a young woman dies, a seminarian is locked in a church with her body for three nights, and she does not stay still. Add the drowned maidens of old tales and Kupala Night, when people sang till dawn and leapt over fires. In these stories beauty can soothe you, and then it can swallow you. I wanted ten seconds that do both.
My approach
A personal experiment in how far AI can carry atmosphere, light and a single facial expression. I built the look on a moodboard first, generated the stills, then animated each shot: the ring dance, a hem moving through the grass, the birch branches, and one last close-up.
What I learned
The prompt decides everything. When a shot didn't work the first time, piling on more words never fixed it. Going back to the basics did: subject, light, one movement. Then I built up from there, one detail at a time.
Tools used
The script
Girls in pale linen dresses and flower crowns dance a khorovod in the fog. The camera drifts closer. Short close-ups: a hem brushing the grass, hands locked together, birch branches swaying. Folk singing, and the sounds of the forest. In the last frame, one girl stands at the centre and looks straight into the lens…
How it ends stays in the video. I turned each line of this script into prompts, generated the stills in Nano Banana Pro, brought them to life in Kling and cut the fragments together in CapCut.
beautiful, calm, hypnotic… until it isn't
Ten seconds.
Sound on. Don't look away.
0:10 · 16:9 · AI-generated · folk audio