The task
The author of an Italian novel was looking for a trailer for her book about an art expert, a stolen Sienese Madonna and the Nazi plunder of art. A strict brief: exactly 18 seconds including the cover, few places and characters, the Madonna must be recognizable, the heroine’s pregnancy must not be shown. Music in the spirit of the soundtrack to The Hours by Philip Glass, but original.
The difficulty: the platform accepted only images and GIFs, no video uploads. At the time of research there were 65 entries, nearly all AI images “in a generic cinematic look”, and not a single rating from the client.
Why, and what the idea was
To stand out we had to show that we had read the book: a doll with one eye and no lashes, the mother’s lullaby, real Sienese painting with a gold ground. And do what none of the 65 had done: a precise second-by-second storyboard from the brief together with a finished 18-second video with sound.
One decision was revised along the way. At first we wanted to describe the Madonna in words, “in the Sienese manner”. Three attempts gave rejects: the Child had three arms, then two Children at once. We took a real public-domain painting as the reference (Sano di Pietro, Madonna and Child, Siena, 15th century) and generated our own icon reference from it.
How it went
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| Day 1, 14:30 | Research: the brief, 65 competing entries, the client’s history (on the platform since 2016, had bought book trailers twice), the “images and GIF only” limit |
| Day 1, 15:30 | Trailer plan: the book’s style, 13 similar films, 14 reference shots from ShotDeck with camera and light, second-by-second script, all prompts |
| Day 1 | With the client’s permission we opened her PDF with 22 pictures. Plan adjusted: Beirut instead of the Alps, Geneva, the domes of Odessa, a church interior for the fire |
| Day 1, 17:00 | Music in Suno, the track “The Felt Arpeggio”. Listened to, approved |
| Day 2, 08:50 | 4 character references and 9 key frames in Nano Banana Pro |
| Day 2, 09:20 | Frames checked up close. Rejects: three arms, a stray plane, someone else’s Madonna in the archive, fire coming out of the walls. 6 frames redone |
| Day 2, 10:30 | 9 clips in Kling 3.0. Redone: the sea, the plane, the church, the archive three more times |
| Day 2, 11:15 | Trailer assembled by script, delivery files ready. Submitted at 11:20 |
Tools and method
Character references were made first and attached as an image to every frame: appearance does not hold when described in words. For each frame we took a real shot from a film (Ammonite, The Hours, Casino Royale, Never Look Away, Ida, A Haunting in Venice) and transferred it to our script: shot size, lens, light, color.
Frames: Nano Banana Pro, 2752x1536. Animation: Kling 3.0, 1080p, 5-second clips, 1 to 2.4 s of each used in the edit. Music: Suno, a cut from 89 to 104 s plus a final chord, exactly 18.00 s, loudness -16 LUFS. Voice: ElevenLabs v3, three lines of the lullaby, whispered. Edit: a Python script with ffmpeg, captions, a 0.4 s fade, the cover for 2.6 s.
Result
The video is 18.00 s, 1920x1080, 30 fps. 0-3 s: a stormy sea, a red-haired girl with a doll, “Odessa, 1987”. 3-6 s: adult Helena in Geneva, a plane window over Beirut. 6-11 s: the forger’s hand lays gold leaf, a black-and-white 1939 archive, a flashlight beam across the Madonna’s face. 11-15 s: paintings burn in a Venetian church, the frame of our icon burns in close-up. 15-18 s: fade to black and the cover.
Sound: piano and strings, building to the fire, cut off at second 15. Over it, a woman whispers in French: “Dors, poupée, dors… prends garde à tes pas… entre ciel et terre”.
What we do not know yet: whether the client liked it. At submission time none of the 89 entries had a rating. We will add it when it comes.
Mistakes and what we took from them
