Two Years to Two Weeks: Uncanny Harry's Six Films, Broken Down

Named after the valley.

Chris's first question was the obvious one: why Uncanny Harry? It is a play on the uncanny valley, the feeling you get when something looks human but isn't quite right. Early AI had plenty of that, demonic and otherworldly, and the name stuck. Ryan has been making AI work since 2022, right at the very early stage, in the era of Kaiber and Midjourney 3 and 4.

Producer Paul had found something Chris didn't know: Ryan studied under Ken Russell. When Ryan met him, Russell had fallen out of favour with Hollywood producers and was shooting The Fall of the House of Usher on Super 8 and DV, with bugs in a giant aquarium. Ryan thinks he would have loved AI, because it lets you make stories independently.

“He loved doing what he wanted to do, and he took no prisoners.”

Uncanny Harry▶ 4:42

AI filmmaking is now pretty much Ryan's full-time job, and has been his main income for the last year and a half. He was wrapping up his last broadcast projects at the BBC, where he was mainly based at Broadcasting House, and had permission to work on AI independently. Andrew, who worked in BBC radio before leaving to help launch MySpace, asked how the BBC felt about Ryan becoming the AI guy. Some people see AI as an opportunity, Ryan said, and others as something that will destroy jobs and traditional craft, the same argument as everywhere.

Talk to it like a crew.

Asked what transferred from broadcast, Ryan said direction. He started out as a cameraman, and talking to a camera operator or another department about what you want is, he says, much the same as talking to an AI: concise and controlled, but with room for them to put their own stamp on it.

So he is not one for giant prompts. He iterates on images to get the character design right, but keeps the direction for the animation succinct, because a model fed too much can't tell what matters.

“Put a nice concise prompt in that's pointing to exactly what you want, then it gets it pretty much every time.”

Uncanny Harry▶ 10:11

The hosts pointed out that Ryan's work is full of lip sync and dialogue, the thing most AI filmmakers avoid. The safe production choice, Ryan agreed, is images, close-ups and music with no dialogue, or perhaps a voice-over. He likes telling a story without dialogue, but most stories need people talking to each other, so he has been pushing it for a long time. Real actors' voices still make a huge difference.

Then he gave away the tip of the session. Models only have a few stock voices, and prompting a soldier for a different voice often changes nothing. Change the face instead.

“What you'll also find is faces will change voices.”

Uncanny Harry▶ 12:47

Put a mustache on that soldier, and the same voice prompt can come back aristocratic. He had only found it out the other day. Mary's question from the chat followed: what old broadcast habit did he have to unlearn? Going slow. Personal work for social media has to get out fast, because the models change so quickly and people are watching on their phones, not on television.

“I think that speed is of the essence now for all of us.”

Uncanny Harry▶ 14:45

One button press won't get you there.

Paul asked whether Ryan really uses all 15 seconds of a Seedance generation, and what he thought of 30-second gens coming in Seedance 2.5. His method is to plan what the scene can achieve in 15 seconds, because the model keeps the scene, the space and the characters far more coherent inside one generation, then run it about three times.

“You're going to use different takes from different hits. So I think that's an important thing to get your head around, that is one button press is not going to get you there.”

Uncanny Harry▶ 17:21

He will use 30-second generations. They will make him faster, but more expensive, since he expects to run each of those three times too, and a 4K 30-second gen will be heavy duty. It has already made him less flippant: he used to misspell prompts or forget to add no music, which an agent like invideo's Agent One now handles by adding standing instructions to every prompt.

The speed is real. A three-minute personal piece used to take him almost a month. Now it takes three days with a bit of prep, and good 30-second gens might make it two. The catch is the cost, and what it does to the field.

“I think we're starting to see a gap opening up between the hobbyists and people who are doing it professionally.”

Uncanny Harry▶ 19:12

A love story, and a demon god.

▶ Watch The Betrothed

The Betrothed was Ryan's first Seedance 2.0 film, made in about two and a half days while the model was still in closed access. Lady Amelia is courted on a ship by a man who begs her to start a new life with him in America, but she is promised to something else. The story is original. Cthulhu and his mythology come from H. P. Lovecraft, whose work is now out of copyright, which Ryan called a very quick way of accessing a mythology.

It started with a Midjourney image he made almost two years earlier, of Cthulhu rising out of the sea in front of a boat. He asked himself what the story could be, and the answer was a love story on board, with the heroine betrothed to a demon god from another dimension. Then he built it as he went.

“I let it do the opening move, and then I grabbed the characters and turned them into character sheets. So I sort of let it make the characters up.”

Uncanny Harry▶ 25:40

The music came from Suno, and his first move is to tell Suno what the music is for at the front of the prompt: a cinematic score for a film with Cthulhu. People think that's irrelevant, he says, but it sets the tone. Chris shared a tip from Issa at Google I/O, who puts timestamps in his music prompts to time the drums to the action, and a viewer said ElevenLabs music can do the same.

Ryan's own trick needs no audio workstation. He remixed the same Suno track three times, each one more intense, and cut between them.

“I think I did like three remixes of the same song, building the intensity in each remix.”

Uncanny Harry▶ 29:16

Because every remix shares the same beat and sound, there are points where you can join them smoothly enough to get away with it.

Six or seven, then reroll.

A question from the chat: what's the best tip for prompting multiple people? Keep the shots tight and always use character references. Past three people the model starts confusing them, moving one person's features onto another, and the rerolls pile up. The most recognisable characters he has managed in one shot is six or seven.

“If you try and use text prompts to reinforce the character, that can sometimes give the model leeway to make its own interpretation.”

Uncanny Harry▶ 32:14

Even with good prompting, he says, it's still a stickler, and he was hoping Seedance 2.5 would be a little better at it.

The right model for subtle acting.

▶ Watch Blood and Canvas

Blood and Canvas was the most-played video on Ryan's YouTube channel, and the film that later won him a Metamorph Award. A broke painter refuses to sell his collection to the dealer he owes two years of rent, and his paintings take care of the rest. Ryan calls it a love letter to British Hammer horror and American horror of the 80s: the Sam Raimi films like The Evil Dead he loved as a kid, and the Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing films on TV, with their short, twisty tales.

The chat compared it to The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, and the hosts singled out the facial acting. That was the reason he made it in Kling 3.0, through his partnership with invideo, even though he already had beta access to Seedance.

“I think Kling's a really, really good tool. It's been overshadowed a lot by Seedance, cuz Seedance can do kung fu cats and all that sort of stuff.”

Uncanny Harry▶ 38:03

For a subtle story, Kling is cheaper and better. Ask Seedance for a simple little gesture and it sometimes tries to do too much, where Kling sticks to what you asked for. It does photo realism well, and you can make 4K close-ups far more cheaply, which suits intimate stories.

invideo, he explained, doesn't make its own models. It is an aggregator with all the models on one platform, and the biggest one in India, serving Bollywood. He likes that it lets creators roll with their own work, rather than handing them a rigid script of what to say about it.

Tell stories about where you're from.

▶ Watch The Innsmouth Void

In 2019, the setup goes, two YouTube potholers went missing in the Yorkshire Dales. Tom and Andy's cheerful vlog at Innsmouth Gill goes off the survey and very wrong. It is found footage, made in Seedance 2.0, and it went from banter between two North Yorkshire lads to pretty intense, as Chris put it, in the space of one video.

Andrew said what he likes most about Ryan's work is that it is very British, from Camden Market on a bridge in Blood and Canvas to these accents. Danny Ratcliff, who grew up in North Yorkshire, said in the chat they were spot on. They weren't real actors. Ryan prompted the accents in Seedance, then locked them.

“I then clipped those up and fed them back in as references. So they then kept those voices the whole way through.”

Uncanny Harry▶ 45:51

For Ryan, that is the whole point. Take a great idea to an American production company and they will often want to make it an American story, because that is their biggest market and how they recoup their money.

“This is the big thing about AI, is that we can tell stories about where we're from without compromise.”

Uncanny Harry▶ 46:01

A British story, a Thai one or a South American one, told without diluting it for a mass audience. Jimmy from 404 Films summed it up in the chat: win your niche, win the world.

One image, one conversation.

▶ Watch Dust

Dust is short and quiet: a father and his son Leo under the stars, deciding that nothing matters unless you make it matter, before heading home for dinner. Chris remembered it as a welcome break from the heavy sci-fi when it was on the weekly show. It grew from a single Midjourney image, the wide shot, and one question: they're having a conversation, so what are they talking about?

Going from horror to something this gentle is a freedom Ryan doesn't take for granted. Seeking funding as a filmmaker, you need a lane, the horror guy or the comedy guy, and a history of work that proves you can sell it. With production this cheap, he says, you don't.

“You want to make a love story, you make a love story.”

Uncanny Harry▶ 51:36

Set yourself a brief.

Andrew put a question from the chat: where do the ideas come from? Often something personal. Ryan is a father, and he has conversations like the one in Dust with his boys. The other trigger is a new model, or some time to experiment, and he has one rule for that.

“There's no point in just going, oh, here's some pretty pictures, isn't this model great? Make a story. Sharpen your storytelling skills while you do it.”

Uncanny Harry▶ 54:03

The Innsmouth Void began as a brief to himself: he hadn't seen any found footage horror made with AI, so could it be done? Innsmouth is Lovecraft again, a town in bed with fish demons, and he had tried a three-shot version with cavers back in Runway. When you had two mates and a camera, the limits were built in. Now you have to impose them.

“The problem is you need to set yourself boundaries, cuz you can do anything now.”

Uncanny Harry▶ 55:09

Pick something to explore, write yourself a little brief, and set a time to finish: what's the best I can do in three, four or five days? Danny guessed that Neil Marshall's The Descent inspired the caving film, and it did. Ryan still sees as much as he can at the cinema, and doesn't like calling himself an artist: too working class, he joked, even though his mum is a potter and his dad studied at the Royal College of Art.

“What's in your training model? You got to put as much in the model as possible, so you got enough to draw upon when you're doing it.”

Uncanny Harry▶ 57:25

Asked what genre he wants to tackle next, he said what most people want next: IP. One world, with its own rules, where you can make a comedy, a horror, a social drama or a romance. Marvel had that idea but feels too Hollywood and mainstream for him. He prefers the way Tarantino's films link to each other without everyone living in one universe. The one thing he probably won't do is a musical.

Easter eggs, and a two-week film.

▶ Watch Clickbait

Clickbait is about simulation theory. A TV presenter, who Chris spotted was Ryan himself, lays out the odds that we live in a simulation, quoting Neil deGrasse Tyson's 50/50 and Elon Musk's billion to one, while a family bickers at home and things go very wrong. Chris called it a bit of an in-joke, because he and Andrew talk about this all the time.

It is packed with Easter eggs. Lola spotted Streamberry, the fake Netflix. There is an ad for Spectacular Optics, from Cronenberg's Videodrome, and posters for Ryan's own films on the walls, including The Innsmouth Void. Ryan sees this as world building, the way the Tarantino-verse sits next to our own world. He makes the posters and feeds them in, and on his latest piece he is inventing money and products too, so nobody ever has to put Coca-Cola in a shot.

Clickbait is also a remake. He first shot it on a mobile phone five or six years ago, and it won awards in the States. Making films by hook or by crook is what he has always done, and AI has been a boon.

“It used to take me 2 years to make a short film. The organization involved and getting everything together and making sure it was all perfect. And now it takes me 2 weeks.”

Uncanny Harry▶ 1:08:57

Blood and Canvas, Ryan confirmed, won the Metamorph Award, and he took his partner to the festival. Then the reality of the schedule. Paid work is a conveyor belt: he is usually booked two or three weeks ahead, with project work into the end of September, and he turns down jobs that need doing tomorrow. Personal films get made in the gaps, on evenings and weekends, in 12-hour days with a short break, before he comes up for air and family time.

He edits in Adobe Premiere Pro, having learned on Avid years ago. DaVinci Resolve is free or a one-off fee and he would switch if he had the time, but he likes the After Effects integration and Adobe's AI features, and has just signed up for another eight months.

A script from the cupboard.

▶ Watch The Quarry

The Quarry was the chat's favourite, and Chris's: a mum, late again, takes her son Tyler out for the day, past the fence and into an old quarry where she and her mates used to run wild. Danny called it his favourite unfinished piece in AI. Andrew trains TV producers, and this is the film he always shows them to prove what is possible now, because it feels so British.

The script is around 15 years old. It never got made and had been sitting in the cupboard, until Ryan thought the tools might be ready to do it convincingly. He made it in early Seedance 2.0, at 720p, with some shots in Kling, a couple of hours at a time. Then the conveyor belt of paid work got too packed, and that is the trouble with putting a film down.

“Once you leave something, if you come back to it a month later, all the tools have changed.”

Uncanny Harry▶ 1:19:30

Everything is 4K now, and new shots would jump out next to the 720p ones. He had reached the tricky bit too: no spoilers, but they will meet the man with the wheelbarrow. His plan is to go back with Seedance 2.5 at 4K and see how close it can get to something most people would take for a real piece of television.

Show the world, don't explain it.

▶ Watch Here Be Monsters, Episode 1: Strawberries

The session ended with a premiere. Paul had seen it; Chris and Andrew hadn't. It was the first minute and a half of Here Be Monsters, with no grade and no ending yet: a ginger cat chases a rat, two monster hunters weigh up a young creature worth about 40 quid, and decide to follow it back to the den for real money.

The cat and the rat are a hint at why this world is so messed up. London has been destroyed, there are monsters everywhere, and Ryan refuses to explain it all at once.

“They try and do a lot of exposition up front, but this is sort of show you what's happened and sort of build out the world slowly.”

Uncanny Harry▶ 1:25:48

Paul asked whether the monster statue in The Innsmouth Void was the same creature. There is a Lovecraftian element to it all: London gangsters, Lovecraftian monsters and London humour, a collision of everything he has made so far. It is the one-world idea from earlier, with factions working towards different ends, and room to break off and follow the grunts at the bottom rather than the starship captain. These two hunt monsters for the bounty. For the gritty streets, he used reference images for the style of housing he wanted.

Carlos asked what The Quarry was made in: early Seedance 2.0 at 720p, partly in closed access, plus some Kling. Ryan hoped to put the new piece out the next day, next week at the latest. It landed the next day, 9 July, as Here Be Monsters, Episode 1: Strawberries. You can find him at uncannyharry.com, as Uncanny Harry on X, and as Ryan Phillips on LinkedIn.