Inheriting Eden
A lower-city investigator on a distant habitable colony is pulled into the secret murder of an emperor, only to discover the world’s most revered leader arranged the killing to seize a path to Earth, the paradise humanity was told had died a thousand years ago.
Character exploration & scene test
This scene test uses dummy dialogue developed from the core beats of the film idea. It was created to explore the characters, particularly the mother, who is the protagonist.
I also wanted to test Seedance 2.0, the latest model available at the time of writing on 6 May 2026, and assess its ability to deliver nuanced performance. So far, it has produced the strongest acting results of any model I have used. It can also take video and audio references, allowing mannerisms, expressions and vocal inflections to be carried through into the characters.
Inheriting Eden, began as a simple cinematic world exploration before developing into a character study. It is now being written as a feature film.
I had deliberately avoided exploring science fiction through AI because so many people were doing it, but I love the genre and could only resist for so long. I had ideas, worlds and characters I wanted to explore, and the story began to emerge from there.
One image in particular, created in Midjourney, stayed with me. The pose of the female character had a presence I could not get out of my head, so I began building a story around her.
The masked figures and the blue-eyed Oracle character also drew me in, and they have since become central to the world and mythology I am developing.
Below are some early world explorations.
Early world exploration montage
Below are more recent world explorations in context of the story
Below are further explorations of the Protagonist’s world and her apartment.
This took time to get the balance right.
Below are character sheets developed to be fed into the AI video models
