Pitch Trailer · Original IP
A cinematic pitch trailer for an eight-episode mini-series that does not exist yet. Written, directed and produced in-house, end-to-end on an AI-assisted pipeline.
Where it comes from
It started as a test. A single Midjourney portrait, adapted and then animated with Seedance 2, came back looking less like an AI clip than like a frame lifted from a real production. That was the moment hyperrealistic fiction stopped being a curiosity and became a project. It needed a subject that commands attention on sight, and Cleopatra does. It is also one of the most saturated themes in AI video, which made the brief explicit from day one: not to ride the wave, but to outclass it.
The weakness of almost everything in that wave is the same. Pretty images with nothing behind them. A trailer is not a collection of shots. It is a promise: an arc, questions asked and left open, tension that rises, a story suggested but never told. So instead of generating scenes and cutting them together, we went the other way round. We imagined the entire film first.
What came out of that work is a full series bible. A three-act synopsis, a numbered sequence breakdown, a cast of recurring characters with their own arcs, historical anchors taken from the real events of 48 to 44 BC, and a sixty-shot list for the trailer itself. None of it is on screen. All of it is felt. Every line spoken in the trailer belongs to a scene that exists on paper. Every face belongs to someone who has a part to play in the story. That is what gives the piece its coherence, and its reason to exist.
Conceived as the showcase for our AI trailer offer, the project found a second destination along the way: Runway's Big Pitch Contest for Shows that Don't Exist Yet, for which it grew into the full pitch of an eight-episode mini-series.
We have been told that Cleopatra fought to save Egypt, and lost. This is what we were meant to remember. What if Egypt was never what she was fighting to save?
THE HIDDEN reframes the most famous love story of antiquity as a covert operation. Cleopatra is the keeper of a knowledge older than Rome, handed down by a line of initiates of Amun, the hidden god, never named and never shown. Caesar is the unlikely agent she enlists to scatter it across an empire that does not yet know it is the agent of its own end. A political thriller in togas and linen. A story about the parasites that hollow civilisations from within, and about the people, in every age, who quietly keep something else alive.
The two leads
The Keeper
Not the glamorous icon, not the seductress. A queen who already knows that Egypt cannot be saved, and who chooses what to protect instead. In public she fights for her throne. Her real operation is the extraction of a handful of initiates before the net closes. She knows she is not important, and that she is essential. Both are true at once.
You came for grain, Caesar. Rome will have it. But there is a greater hunger than Rome's.
The Instrument
The most powerful man in the world, and the first to admit that brute force lacks true greatness. He does not fall for a mystery. He recognises what he has always suspected exists beyond the Empire, and lends the operation the one thing he masters better than anyone: the logistics of an empire. He will die for something of which he has only seen a reflection.
I rule the world. And I have never felt so small.
Supporting cast
Servant and master
To the palace, the woman who combs the queen's hair. When the guards leave the room, the one who has carried the knowledge the longest.
Witness to the fire
The night the Library of Alexandria burns, he stands with scrolls under his arms and his hair scorched, watching what cannot be saved.
The loyal one
At Caesar's side from the landing at Alexandria. He sees the eternal kingdom of Egypt where his general sees a granary.
Bought from within
A Roman blade in Caesar's own ranks, already answering to the men in Rome who need the operation stopped.
The parasite
Modelled on the financier who once ran Egypt's treasury to recover a royal debt. He treats dynasties as assets and belongs to no civilisation.
The bridge
Seen first in Pothinus's circle in Alexandria, then in Rome among Cassius's conspirators. Same seal, two capitals: the whole network in one face.
At the banquet
She pours the wine the night the banker and the merchant raise their cups to the burning Library.
The craft
Characters were designed in Midjourney and locked so that every face holds from shot to shot. Scenes were animated with Seedance 2 and Runway, voiced with ElevenLabs, scored with Suno, then edited, graded and finished in After Effects and DaVinci Resolve. Twenty-seven years of animation craft behind every frame.