My kid's movie in cinema

Normally, I really want to read him an actual book before bed. But after somehow fitting half our household into the car, there was no room left for books unless I strapped them to the roof.

So this time, bedtime stories became ChatGPT stories.

I’m not the biggest ChatGPT fan anymore, but for making up stories for a five-year-old, it does a pretty great job. (Where Claude probably would have given me an HTML page with three graphs.)

Mats first idea was simple: Mats and Eelco were astronauts.

They built a rocket and travelled into space. First to Mars. Then to a forest planet. A pizza planet. The Strange Faces Planet. A ghost planet.

And increasingly ridiculous places that Mats started inventing himself.

Every night, he was looking forward to going to bed to hear where Mats and Eelco would end up next. Some of the stories genuinely had him laughing out loud.Then came the inevitable question: “Can we also have a picture?”

Of course. So every story got an image too.

You could see his eyes light up when Mats and Eelco suddenly started moving. The characters we had been talking about every night were actually coming alive. Can Mats and Eelco also be in the cinema?

A few weeks later, we were talking about going to see the new Paw Patrol movie at the cinema. Mats asked:

“Can Mats and Eelco also be in the cinema?”

“No, of course not.” A perfectly reasonable answer. Except he asked again. And at some point I started thinking:

Well… why not?

I contacted our friends at Pathé and explained the idea. They were willing to play along.

So suddenly, a collection of improvised bedtime stories from a camping holiday had a deadline: We had to make a movie.

We had to discuss what was going to be in the movie:

And just a few weeks after inventing Mats and Eelco together in a tent, he was sitting in a real cinema.

The lights went down.

The Pathé logo appeared.

And then two little astronauts called Mats and Eelco appeared on the big screen.

For him, they weren’t AI-generated characters. They were his characters.

And that might be the part of generative AI I’m still most excited about. Not generating another ad slightly faster. Not replacing a photoshoot. Not producing infinite amounts of content.

But dramatically reducing the distance between imagining something and actually experiencing it.

A five-year-old can make up a planet before going to sleep. And a few weeks later, he can visit it on a cinema screen.

That’s pretty magical.

There’s another reason this little experiment stuck with me. I tried something similar a couple of years ago, in the early days of generative video.

Back then, making anything resembling a story meant generating tiny clips of maybe two seconds, hoping something useful happened, and then stitching all those fragments together. Below a small snippet of one of the best (!) outcomes.

Keeping a character consistent from one shot to the next was nearly impossible. Movement was unpredictable. And creating anything longer than a few seconds required a lot of patience and editing.

This time was completely different.

Together with my colleague Nick Den Turck , who loved the idea from the start, we made the entire 15-minute film in no more than two days of actual production time.

We combined different image and video models, which gave us some genuinely impressive results. I was surprised by how far things have come.

Longer shots. More consistent characters. Better control. Faster iterations. And by connecting different models and workflows, we could finally approach it as an actual production rather than a collection of AI experiments. Also this was a great opportunity to test our latest AI Flows feature of Cape.io

There are still weird AI moments in the film. It’s definitely not Pixar. But comparing this with what was possible just a few years ago is pretty incredible. And if this is what two days can get you today, I’m very curious what Mats will be asking me to put in the cinema a few years from now.

A special thank to Rob van Lierop from Pathé, for being crazy enough to lend us a cinema and put Mats and Eelco on the big screen.