> without the distraction of AI blemishes

Maybe I'm just detail oriented, but "police" wasn't even spelled right on the officer's sparse uniform. That isn't even half way into the movie, and by then I'd spotted dozens of other weird AI details.

Fair enough.-

I think the point being not "no blemishes" but "story and execution good enough for blemishes not to be distracting" still stands.-

The point is that if you are looking for any amount of details, you will notice this was full of AI blemishes.

The common word "POLICE" misspelled with non-letters on an otherwise empty uniform was an obvious one, but so was the historical singer's face changing in just the first few cuts.

I...don't. The story was fine, and the execution was understandable given the state of the tooling, but viewed as a film and not a tech demo of advances in what is acheivab;e with modern AI tools it's not great. Many of the voices have the same very noticeable robotic features, and the delivery, whether narration or diegetic dialogue, is monotonous; the "angry crowd" is almost the only place in the whole work that speaking voices appear impacted by emotion, and even that feels off. The scenes have consistent, very limited range of lengths and a very limited palette of simple continuous camera movements, consistently using one per clip.

Even though the mockumentary format is an excellent choice for minimizing the impact of several of those problems, they are still pretty glaring there, even if less so than if you tried to make literally any other style of film with the same techniques.

I really appreciate your insightful look into this, and will again view the video with an eye to these issues you point out.-

PS. We might be a tad beyond "train arriving at the station" territory, at least - that much can be granted methinks.-

It reminded me a lot of many video game cut scenes. It is still hitting uncanny valley a lot. eg. Voice acting recorded phrase by phrase with limited context and odd pacing better suited for the stage. Acting by puppets with somewhat inhuman movement.

This short is an amazing achievement, and (at least to me) a very skillful and clever use of AI. But I don't think it's a good film. And that has nothing to do with AI blemishes. If it had been made shot-for-shot without AI, I probably wouldn't have watched til the end. If I had to put my finger on it, I'd say we spend way too long with a character (the only character) we don't ever really know. The sort-of movie reel concept that keeps her at a distance could work, but I think it would need to be cut way down, maybe half the time. Cutting the clone comeback (which doesn't really advance the plot) would save 4 or 5 minutes.