Building a world, image by image

A man fits a feathered wing to a doll in a blue room — One of the four blue-room images I kept.

Taste of Belladonna follows an air doll passed from one owner to another. She absorbs something from each person (a feature, a voice, a memory) until she becomes human and must confront a frightening question: if a self is made from everything it encounters, what makes anyone singular?

I come from traditional live-action filmmaking, where I work as an art director, but I have always loved painting and making images and spaces that carry a story before a character says a word. AI filmmaking has helped me bring visions to life that once existed only as sketches, references or scenes in my head. I use Absurd as an extension of that practice: a place to think visually, build worlds, test cinematic choices and discover the film through images.

My starting point is still the same as it is on a physical set: every room is a character. The architecture, objects, colour and light must reveal who lives there and how the doll is seen by them. When I reviewed my first rounds in Absurd, too many rooms could have belonged to anybody. Strangeness was not enough; each set needed a private logic.

Mengqing Yuan seated beside leafy plants — Mengqing Yuan

The doll’s face and its reflection beside a feathered wing — A closer view of her face and reflection.

The doll sits among months of withered flowers in a lived-in basement, lit by one high window — The opening basement: months of flowers, one high window and a table still set for two.

Turning a beat into a room

The film opens in a cellar that feels genuinely lived in. She sits in a sea of withered flowers accumulated over months. One high window is the only warm source, and its shaft lands on her alone.

In front of her, a marble table is set for two: two wine glasses with dried dregs, a bottle, dirty plates and a candle burnt down to its end.

He has been having dinner with her.

In Absurd, I developed the room around the traces someone would leave behind. I wanted the audience to sense a routine that had been going on long before this shot.

Young filmmakers often begin by looking to their heroes, trying to understand why certain films stay with them. For me, Park Chan-wook, Wong Kar-wai and David Lynch are important reference points. I brought them into my conversations with Absurd to help communicate my taste: controlled compositions, expressive colour, long holds, unease beneath stillness and dream logic. Naming the filmmakers gives us a starting point; explaining what moves me in their work makes the direction more personal.

Sometimes Absurd offers ideas I had not considered, and we discuss how these filmmakers use framing, light and atmosphere. Those exchanges can be educational: they help me put words to an instinct and consider how a visual choice might serve my own scene. I can take what feels relevant, question what does not, and turn the discussion into a more precise direction. The goal is to bring the images closer to the film I originally imagined, while staying open to discoveries along the way.

I also described the photographic qualities I wanted: an Alexa Mini with Zeiss primes and a grainy 35mm finish. Even in its most surreal moments, the world needed to feel photographed rather than rendered.

The beat sheet became the spine of the canvas. I organized each moment as its own visual problem, cast the doll’s face, and built a library of looks so she could change from room to room without losing continuity. Absurd let story development, casting, costume and production design live beside one another instead of becoming separate documents.

For the blue room, the story action was simple: a man fits an angel’s wing to the doll in front of a mirror. I generated different framings, selected four of ten images, and used those choices to understand the scene spatially: the room, her reflection, the spare wing and the circular mirror. Then I pushed the reflection further until the room began to feel psychologically strange.

Room study · The cook

Directing colour and continuity

The kitchen needed to look like somebody’s home. One version was starting to look like a restaurant. I liked the green and yellow light, and the view through the window with the taps and sill close to us. She would sit on the counter while he cooked.

Then her face went green too. I wanted the room’s colour to stay, her face to be warm, and the unnatural seam at her neck to disappear. I gave the agent those corrections and asked for eight clothing variations, using the window image I’d kept and her face reference.

A doll sits on a kitchen counter beside a cook under green fluorescent light — The kitchen image I kept, with her face warm under the green light.

The cooking take I kept. Eight seconds, a fixed camera, rising flames and the doll sitting still.

I chose the cream bow blouse and used that image as the starting frame in Absurd. The locked camera holds the contrast between the cook’s activity and her stillness. When I revise a take, I return to the same selected still so the movement can change without losing the design decisions already established.

Under the overpass, I liked seeing the two of them upside down in a puddle. I asked for eight more lighting variations and kept two. One had rainbow oil on the water; the other caught a green pharmacy cross in the reflection.

The first two videos gave me raindrops and rings spreading across the water. I rejected both. Instead, I gave the figures small actions that could express their relationship cinematically within eight seconds: he breathes in his sleep and pulls the blanket tighter while a passerby’s feet break their reflection. The movement is minimal, but it turns a beautiful image into a story beat.

A man and the doll reflected upside down in a rain puddle beneath a silver blanket — The oil-slick image I used as the starting frame.

The underpass take I kept. A footstep breaks the reflection before he pulls the blanket tighter.

Mengqing Yuan’s canvas with separate kitchen and underpass scene studies — Kitchen and underpass rounds arranged on the canvas.

How I worked

Editing through images

The canvas runs left to right like the film, with one column for each beat. New rounds stack beneath earlier ones, so I can compare alternatives without losing track of the chosen frame.

I vary framing, lens, light and palette deliberately, then mark the images I want to keep and specify what needs correcting. For new compositions, I start fresh; for a selected frame, I gather my corrections into one careful edit rather than repeatedly modifying the result.

When the image answers back

While exploring angles of the blue room in Absurd, one image surprised me: the spare wing fills the foreground, while the doll falls into blur behind it. I had been concentrating on the whole set; this frame made me reconsider how little of it I needed to show.

The wing’s texture and weight are clear, but the action behind it remains uncertain. The object becomes a clue, leaving the audience to imagine what happened before the shot and what might happen next.

A spare feathered wing in the foreground and the doll reflected behind it — The generated angle that made me rethink how a foreground object could hold the story.

Finding my own voice

At the heart of Taste of Belladonna is a question I return to in my own work. The doll longs for a voice, then fears that the parts she has absorbed make her less individual. Yet those encounters are also what allow her to become someone. Her story gives form to my feelings about influence: the people we have loved, the memories we carry and the images that stay with us become part of how we see.

Working in Absurd brings that question into my practice. I can recognize something of my intentions in an unexpected image without having imagined every detail beforehand. The work is in deciding whether it belongs in this film, and how it changes what comes next.

For me, influence does not erase authorship. What makes the work mine is not that it came from nothing, but that it passed through my attention. As I continue making the film, the doll’s final words feel like a way of understanding that process:

“I am a part of all that I have met. For always roaming with a hungry heart.”
The doll’s final voice-over, adapted from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses