Uncanny Harry aka Ryan Phillips

A cameraman who studied under Ken Russell

Ryan Phillips started out as a cameraman, and he studied under the director Ken Russell^[1][3]. By the time Ryan met him, Russell had fallen out with Hollywood producers and was making 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^[1]. A 2024 interview on Viggle's blog says Ryan studied film at Southampton^[16].

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

Uncanny Harry, on Ken Russell^[1]

He went on to spend more than two decades in British television, latterly as a lead director for the BBC, based mainly at Broadcasting House^[3][16][1]. When he spoke on the BBC Click LIVE: A.I. Special panel at Advertising Week Europe in May 2023, his speaker bio put it at over twenty-five years^[18]. His website also describes him as BAFTA-nominated, a line Contagious repeats, but neither gives a year or category and AI LIVE could not verify it^[3][14].

Alongside the day job he made his own films, as he puts it, by hook or by crook^[1]. Blood and Chips (2016) follows racial tensions boiling over in a London chip shop during a heatwave, and HomeTown (2017) is a love letter to Rochester shot on an iPhone^[50][51]. Viggle reports that some early short film projects received BFI funding, though none fully launched^[16]. A film called Clickbait, shot on a mobile phone, won awards in the US, he says; he would later remake it with AI^[1].

Named after the valley

He started making AI work in 2022, in the era of Kaiber and Midjourney 3 and 4^[1]. The name came from the uncanny valley: early AI looked, in his words, "demonic and weird and otherworldly", so he became Uncanny Harry^[1]. He joined X under that name on 7 January 2023^[19].

His first AI short, Digital Deity, went up on 20 March 2023: dialogue from ChatGPT-3, images from Midjourney v4, voices from voice.ai, made by one person in two days on a budget of zero^[34]. That May he was testing Runway Gen-2 in The Uncanny Abyss^[61]. In October came A Girl and Her Cat, a post-apocalyptic AI anime made with Moonvalley, Pika, Midjourney and ElevenLabs that drew 31,000 views on X, and in November The Cold Call, a British gangster short with dialogue^[33][63][62]. He has gone back to the girl and her cat several times since^[69].

Talking characters, when others avoided them

The safe production choice in AI film was images, close-ups and music with no dialogue. Ryan kept pushing lip sync and talking characters anyway, because most stories need people talking to each other^[1]. Two of his most viewed early clips were tests: a 24-second cyberpunk anime and an AI lip-sync test, each with around 3,000 views on YouTube^[67][68].

His 2024 showreel describes him as a member of the Runway Creative Partners Program^[39]. That January he made an AI demo of voice replacement, translation, video-to-video and face replacement for BBC Click, and in February a romantic short, Melody of Solace, for Runway's Gen:48 competition^[40][57]. In March he made Scene 29 of Our T2 Remake, the crowd-made AI parody of Terminator 2 billed as the first AI-generated feature film, which premiered at the NuArt Theatre in Los Angeles on 6 March 2024^[35][36].

The same month he launched Uncanny Harriet, an AI pop star whose song Bits of Code he drove with his own performance for her lip sync and movement, and talked about AI going mainstream on the zero1cast podcast^[37][48]. He became one of Viggle's earliest users, filming himself on a phone, animating the footage in Viggle and building the world around it with Runway Gen-3 video-to-video^[16]. He also made choose-your-own-adventure shorts for Dreamflare, and Loved and Lost, a short meditation on grief^[64][65].

It's truly the Wild West for AI content creation right now, and there's no pre-existing network for AI creators.

Uncanny Harry, to Viggle in 2024^[16]

Promise, and the remakes

On 11 February 2025 Tubefilter named him in the first roster of genAI directors at Promise, the generative AI studio co-founded by Dave Clark, George Strompolos and Jamie Byrne, alongside Junie Lau and Guillaume Hurbault^[13]. In May 2026 AI LIVE described him as busy with his work at Promise^[23]. Five days after the Promise news he released Lizard Life, an unofficial Veo 2 music video for Marc Rebillet^[56].

He kept returning to his own films with each new generation of tools. In June 2025 he remade The Cold Call on his own with Runway, Kontext, Midjourney, Kling, Hailuo, Higgsfield and HeyGen, and the remake drew 13,000 views on X^[32]. In July he spoke at the Runway London meetup at Cinesite, and released The Last Dance, a test of what he called pure synthetic performance that went from script to final cut in a day and a half^[47][42]. In November Uncanny Harriet came back as pure AI, with no human driving her, and in December Winter's Lament, a short about grief, went on to be selected for three festivals^[38][43][29].

2026: a film almost every month

In January 2026 Contagious ran two pieces on his methods, and he released Dispatched, a film driven by motion capture performances that later made two festival selections^{[14][15][44][29]}. Kling gave him early access to Kling 3.0, and he conceived, made and delivered its launch promo on his own in three days; AI LIVE played it from the 800MB original^[41][20].

Days later came The Betrothed, made in two and a half days in Seedance 2.0's closed access and built on H. P. Lovecraft's public domain Cthulhu mythology^[8][1]. On the same week's AI LIVE, Yonatan Dor of the Dor Brothers called him the Guy Ritchie of the AI industry^[21]. Blood and Canvas followed on 25 February: London, 1968, a broke painter, a dealer he owes two years' rent, and paintings that take care of the rest, made in Kling 3.0 in partnership with invideo^[7][1]. He confirmed on AI LIVE that it won a Metamorph Award; no public winners list naming the category has been found^[1].

I think Harry's gonna be the Guy Ritchie of the AI industry.

Yonatan Dor, The Dor Brothers, on AI LIVE^[21]

April brought a 44-minute interview on the Saga channel, since watched more than 40,000 times, and two very different films^[46]. The Innsmouth Void is found-footage horror about two YouTube potholers lost in the Yorkshire Dales, with North Yorkshire accents he prompted, clipped and fed back in as references^[11][1]. He had wanted to make AI found footage for a while: a short clip of missing cavers went up in 2024, and he had tried a three-shot caving version in Runway^[60][1]. Dust, a quiet father-and-son film grown from a single Midjourney image and made in partnership with BytePlus, drew ten straight 1s on AI LIVE and was Chris Branch's winner of the night^[12][22]. In May came Clickbait, a simulation-theory horror remade from his old mobile film with invideo's Agent One and packed with invented brands^[10][24].

Then The Quarry: an unfinished British drama from a script he wrote around 15 years earlier, about a mum taking her son Tyler past the fence into an old quarry^[9][1]. He first shared it on X, where it drew 17,800 views, made with Kling, Dreamina's Seedance 2.0, Magnific and Topaz^[30]. On AI LIVE Ep. 120, Andrew Davis called it the most realistic AI video he had seen^[23].

I think this is the most realistic AI video I've seen.

Andrew Davis, on The Quarry^[23]

Here Be Monsters

On 8 July 2026 he was the guest on the first ever AI LIVE Creator Session, screening six films and closing with the first minute and a half of Here Be Monsters, ungraded and unfinished^[1]. Episode 1, Strawberries, came out the next day and became his most watched YouTube video; Episode 2, The Watchtower, followed on 26 August^[5][6][2].

The series is set in London 26 years after a corporate teleportation experiment opened a doorway to an alien world. The army holds a walled green zone around Westminster, four firms divide the Badlands, and two bounty hunters work the streets in between^[4][5]. His site pitches it as "Peaky Blinders with eldritch teeth", plans five seasons, and lists it as a finalist for Best TV Pilot Series at the SHAIKE Film Festival in La Ciotat in 2026; no official finalist list has been found^[4]. At that festival in October he made A Century of Stunts in a single day for the Love Letters to Cinema series, casting himself among a hundred years of movie stunts^[45][27].

Paid work fills the rest of the calendar. Over the summer he made a Black Jacks whiskey spec ad for Runway's Big Ad contest, a world-building test of MiniMax's Hailuo H3 from five Midjourney images, and Runway's promo for Seedance 2.5, then a new showreel and a first behind-the-scenes video for the series^{[52][31][53][58][55]}. He has said he is doing work for NVIDIA, and his site lists clients including The Brand Tech Group, Hat Trick, Lionsgate, The Wonder Project, Secret Level and Storybook^[1][3].

How he works

Ryan's method comes from the set. He talks to a model the way he would to a camera operator: concise and controlled, with room for it to add something of its own^[1]. A film usually starts from a cheap Midjourney image; then he plans what one 15-second generation can hold, runs it about three times and cuts between the takes^[1][15]. When a character keeps getting the same stock voice he changes the face, adding a moustache to a soldier, and once the voices are right he clips them and feeds them back as references^[1].

He builds one shared world across genres, with invented brands such as Streamberry, Spectacular Optical, Aperture and Black Jacks whiskey, so no real logos appear and the films connect, the way Tarantino's do^[1][25]. In invideo he runs an agent loaded with his lore book, his script, a locked style prompt and character storyboards linked to voice references^[17]. By October 2026 he was using Claude to build Blender blocking scenes as driving videos^[28]. Paid work keeps him booked weeks ahead, so his own films get made in the gaps, in 12-hour days^[1].

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

Uncanny Harry^[1]

Asked whether he thinks of himself as an artist, he laughed it off: "I don't like the word artist. I'm sorry. Too working class."^[1]