Over the weekend, for the fal × Sequoia 72h Video Hackathon, I built a short AI film set to Edvard Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King.
Story
The short riffs on the Peer Gynt mountain-hall arc: a trespasser enters forbidden territory, tension escalates with each repetition, and chaos takes over. In my version, a man enters a living mineral hall; as the theme repeats and speeds up, the cave wakes — walls breathe, stone ripples, crystal corridors rearrange — until he is pulled into the rock itself, and the mountain was the creature all along.
There have also been other short-film adaptations of this music, including Mel-O-Toons' Peer Gynt's Adventures in the Hall of the Mountain King (1960), W grocie króla gór, and Steve Cutts' MAN.
Process
- Analyzed the music (tempo, onsets, bars, percussion hits, and accelerando), then built an adaptive beat grid so every cut and transition is locked to the music.
- Style lock with stills first (realistic materials + one impossible twist per shot).
- Keyframes in Seedream 5.0 Pro.
- Animation in Seedance 2.0.
- Continuity via handoff frames (last frame of one shot → first frame of the next).
- Character workaround for likeness blocks: bake identity into a single still, then animate only that image.