Rusty Lake

Rusty Lake isn't a place I visited once. It's somewhere I keep coming back to. It got me through a Chicago winter.

Both films are made almost entirely with AI. Stills come from ThinkDiffusion and ChatGPT, animation from Runway and Krea, sound from ElevenLabs. The editing itself, the pacing, the transitions, the timing of every cut, is mine. Working with AI here felt less like using a shortcut and more like teaching a very literal collaborator. It doesn't understand rhythm until you show it, scene by scene.

The first film (2025) follows a man whose senses are stripped away one by one as he drifts down a river. The second (2026, my entry for UChicago's AI film competition) continues the story: he wakes in a fully surreal world where every sense has been transformed, and has to decide whether to stay there, happy but untethered, or return to the human world as an infant, to sense and love again from the beginning.