The Long Way Home

A trip on an Orbital in Iain M. Banks' Culture

Best experienced at the full site, which includes all the research notes, intermediate steps, and still images.

This project grew out of me asking ChatGPT (Astra) what it would be like to be an ordinary citizen living on an Orbital in the Culture—i.e. not a member of Special Circumstances or even Contact, just one of the trillions of ordinary people living in a post-scarcity society. I had Astra read every Culture novel, along with Banks’ A Few Notes on the Culture, taking notes on Orbital appearance and everyday life.

After some discussion of this, I thought it would be fun to make a short video within this world. I settled on representing “nothing special”, just someone's trip home where they decided to go “the long way”, taking a bunch of different transportation methods just for the pure joy of travel.

Astra created a script for the journey with 24 scenes, then wrote a production package to guide the generation. A “creative bible” describes the setting, characters, clothing, vehicles, and recurring objects in detail. It specifies things like the house’s roof shapes, where the dining table and bag bench sit, and the bag’s single brass buckle and repair patch. The book research is kept in a separate source ledger, which distinguishes details drawn from Banks from things invented for this film.

Each scene has a complete prompt describing who and what is visible, where everything is, the lighting, camera position, action, and sound. The relevant continuity descriptions are repeated in each prompt, since an individual generation doesn’t remember the other scenes. The package also specifies which reference images to attach and what each should control—for example, the house’s architecture or the character’s appearance.

OpenAI’s image model creates those references and a starting frame for each shot. Gemini Omni Flash then animates each starting frame into a six-second clip. An asset registry tracks the selected versions, while the original outputs, prompts, and reference inputs are preserved. There are also scene-specific review criteria and repair instructions. I review the results and give corrections; when a design changes, the affected shots need to be checked or regenerated before everything is assembled into the final film.