The Flower of Nothingness is my debut art film. From the initial version to the final cut, I spent dozens of hours on it.
In November 2012, I wrote a piece called The Flower of Nothingness, drawing on dreams I had experienced. The black and white chaos at the start of the film, and the wild, whirling lines and voices calling out midway through it, all came from those dreams.
More than a decade later, I gave the piece to Claude and asked it to make an initial film on its own. The result exceeded my expectations. In the original text, I had compared the dream’s warmth and chaos to liquid inside an eggshell. Claude chose to add Doppler ultrasound sounds and heartbeats, which made me wonder whether that experience might come from some distant memory of being in the womb. Near the end of the piece, I had described a dull ache in the chest and the urgent heartbeat felt by a hand pressed against it. Claude also picked up on the connection between the black flower and the heart, making the flower pulse and grow from a single drop of ink. That, too, was a wonderful surprise.
Once the initial excitement settled, I began to see the first version’s many shortcomings. Sound, images, and subtitles did not work well together; the music lacked a sense of unity across the film; the modeling was rough; and the cuts and transitions between shots were abrupt. In the work that followed, AI—Claude, Grok, and Codex—helped find material, adjust the images and sound, and generate previews. I kept watching and listening, pointing out what felt wrong or introducing new ideas. After roughly 200 iterations, the final film was much more fully developed in its images, sound, and storytelling. The difference felt like going from a 60 to a 90 out of 100.
The corridor through the photography exhibition took the most effort (and tokens).
In the original piece, the photographs seem to release the past into the present. It becomes hard to tell whether the overlapping gazes and bodies belong to the photographs or to the visitors around them. Partway through production, I thought of Alan Wake 2 and Twin Peaks and began experimenting with double exposure to convey this intermingling. I first overlaid moving figures in the corridor, then tried silhouettes. Neither was satisfying. Getting the AI’s models to look right required a huge amount of refinement.
Eventually, I thought of using real archival footage from the era of black and white film. I wanted the selection to span a wide range of people, places, and times. It begins with Arrival of a Train, then moves through dining tables, fields, factories, migration, war, and public squares, before finally reaching space. The sequence moves roughly forward in time, shifting between places and subjects while keeping people at its center. I took a similar approach to the photographs, except at the end of the corridor: a photograph of the Moon landing on one side, and one of my own photographs on the other.
The Orchid Pavilion Preface (《兰亭序》), which follows the corridor, was another important sequence. The AI initially used an animation of generated Chinese characters; I replaced it with an image of the actual calligraphy. In the original piece, I compare the characters to a living body: the strokes are nerves and blood vessels, with blood as black as ink hidden beneath the paper. The camera moves across the phrases “後之視今” and “今之視昔”—how future generations will look back on us just as we look back on the past. It then moves to an ink blot that happens to sit just below them—the perfect place for the ink to gush out like blood. The AI had proposed drawing a slash across the page, which did not work well.
For the sequence of lines flying through darkness, I expanded on the calls of family and friends from my dream. As the tangle grows, voices gradually join in from different places, ages, languages, and emotional states. The lines grow denser and more chaotic; the voices become more numerous and more intense, until they stop abruptly.
Next, at the AI’s suggestion, I gave the idea of a “game of probability with the universe” a physical form: a Galton board, with marbles falling through rows of pegs. This leads into images already present in the text—a starry sky revealed as a sticker, the facing mirrors, and a surface of water frozen into folds.
The original piece brings us from dream back to reality with a single sentence: “He slowly woke.” In the film, we get to see that awakening unfold. I used images of real curtains and bedsheets, which worked far better than the AI’s rough models.
Then comes the final and most important shot. He returns from chaos to reality, but traces of the dream remain in his body, and the flower of nothingness keeps growing. The images and sound in this sequence went through many iterations. The black flower needed to move with the heartbeat without looking too much like a rubbery heart. It needed to retain the quality of ink, with variations in density and soft bleeding edges. I also tried adding motion around its edges, but that changed its original shape and pulse, making it feel less natural. Eventually, I returned to the original outline and rhythm, keeping only the changes that made the texture look more like ink.
This was not the only time I went back to an earlier version. I tried adding detail and improving materials in some scenes. The result looked more realistic, but lost some of the expressive exaggeration.
There were happy accidents, too. At some point, the sound in the marble sequence acquired a strange electronic texture—a kind of warped distortion. It may have been a side effect of earlier audio processing, but it sounded just right. I lost it when I reorganized the code that generated the film, then spent quite a while having the AI try to reproduce the effect explicitly in code.
The subtitles also took a great deal of work. For most of the process, I worked on a version with subtitles, adjusting the wording, timing, and appearance. Some sentences work on the page but interrupt the experience on screen. Every subtitle needed to work with the images and sound. “But a birth” became a separate line, appearing just as the camera settled on the ink blot; “disillusionment” was cut off along with the sound. How to break up a sentence, how it should appear, how long it should stay, and how it should disappear—all of this went through repeated adjustments.
Yet in the end, I preferred the version without subtitles. It lets viewers give more of their attention to the images and sound, while leaving more room for interpretation. I decided to make that the main release, and to consider later whether to release a subtitled version at all.
There may be more to say, but that is the story behind The Flower of Nothingness.