We sent a short story to an AI and asked it make a video. The result was a strange AI dream, weirdly narrated in David Attenborough’s voice.

The story we used was ‘Sophia and the Lion in the Living Room‘ by author Michael Collins. It’s a good story, with dark, horror themes and worth reading the original before watching the video made using invideo AI.

This was the result.

The AI wrote its own version of the story and changed the ending.

The videos the AI used to create the story mean that Sophia changes her appearance and ethnicity throughout. The lion also changes and sometimes appears as a cute lion cub. This is because the AI just relies on existing video clips and just pieces them together – it doesn’t create any original video.

We didn’t ask for the Attenborough voice and were never able to convince the AI to use that voice to narrate any subsequent videos.

We had more success when asking the AI to create a video discussing the environmental impact of concrete and how this could be mitigated using a new product called ‘Stratadune‘. Here, the AI wrote and narrated the script and the generic videos matched the narration. Here is the result after a few minor edits.

 

Sophia and the Lion in the Living Room – original story by Michael Collins

Sophia’s sitting at her bedside table, doing her hair and make-up, getting ready for her date, when she hears it – a low, muted roar, like a jet airliner taking off, far away. It’s odd because she’s pretty sure the sound has come from downstairs, in the living room. What’s more odd is that she’s the only one here right now – Mum has taken Simon to football training, and Dad’s on lates this month.

So, what is that sound? And, just as importantly, who or what made it?

A large part of Sophia doesn’t want or care to know or find out – she’s meeting Mark in 45 minutes, she has no intention of being late, and she’s nowhere near ready. Probably it was a boy racer, revving his souped-up Micra or something.

But another part of her – the twitchy-nosed, ever-curious part – absolutely must know the source of that low roar, still fading in the distance. She flutters her fingers aimlessly in the air for a moment, deciding. Then puts down her hairbrush on the table and stands, decision made. She’ll poke her head out the front door and see what’s what. Perhaps it was an air ambulance landing on the main road. That’d be something cool to share with Mark.

Sophia pads over to the bedroom door, light-footed and nimble, a tall girl with lean dancer’s legs and chestnut brown hair tied in a simple ponytail with a brand-new yellow ribbon. She turns the handle. It opens on the cramped landing of their end-terraced house. The sound has now gone, and the house is dead silent (just silent, Sophia admonishes herself. Stop thinking spooky things just ‘cause you’re the only one here.)

Sophia’s is one of three bedrooms opening on the rectangle of the landing, carpeted in subdued grey. Her bedroom is to the right of the staircase and directly opposite the bathroom. Sophia steps to the top of the staircase, which descends straight down. To the left is the living room and beyond it the kitchen and a tiny garden. To the right is the small dining room and the front door to the street.

She’ll play a little game, Sophia decides as she crosses the landing. She’s Black Widow, creeping up on some Hydra goons downstairs. To get the jump on them, she cannot make a sound as she takes the stairs. Easier said than done because the staircase is formed of old wooden steps which creak and squeak and rustle and rattle like the keys on an old piano (Dad keeps saying he’ll do it this summer, he’ll do it this summer – Sophia’s been hearing that for about four years). Traversing this noisy little Everest would test the secret agent skills of the real Black Widow. But Sophia has played this game before, many times, she knows all the safe spots on each rickety step, and she can tap dance up and down this staircase without making a sound, which she does now, lightly tiptoeing onto each step with lissom grace, arms outstretched to maintain her balance.

As the staircase descends, the walls open up and the gaps between the thin baluster slats provide a view of the rooms on either side (a pleasant one on sunny spring afternoons like this one, when the April sun casts golden light into the house). Sophia, focused on creeping up on the unsuspecting Hydra guards, doesn’t look through the slats to her left, so she doesn’t register the lion in the living room until it yawns with a loud exhalation, stretches its front legs splayed out on the living room floor, and goes back to sleep.

All thought is driven entirely from Sophia’s mind as she turns her head to her left and sees that there’s a lion in the living room. It’s impossible – inconceivable – that this could be so. Sophia snaps her eyes shut tight, waits two seconds then re-opens them, trying to wipe the lunatic vision from her mind. It doesn’t work.

The lion is male and appears to be fully grown. It’s stretched out comfortably on the pretty blue Greek-style shag rug that Mum got from Wayfair last year, the late afternoon sunlight coming through the window highlighting its glorious golden mane. Its tail, flat out on the floor behind its hindquarters, is near long enough to reach the dust balls underneath the TV stand in the corner. Its front paws – its claws are retracted, but Sophia knows they’re there – nearly touch the skirts of the sofa on the far wall. It is snoring slightly. It is enormous.

With exaggerated care, her hamstrings seemingly screaming in tension, Sophia begins to back herself up the stairs, wincing at every perceived creak and shriek from the distressed boards as she does, her heart a pounding hammer in her chest. She does not take her eyes off the impossible sleeping lion until she reaches the landing again. Even when it’s out of sight, as she reaches the top of the stairs, she backs away across the landing, keeping her eyes fixed on the staircase, feeling and fumbling behind her for the handle to the door of her bedroom, turning it ever so softly, slipping through the door and then closing it gently behind her.

Only once she’s back in her room does she dare to breathe again.

Sophia catches a glimpse of herself in the vanity mirror on her bedside table. Her shocked eyes are open wide, and her skin is ghostly white. She lifts her hands to her face; they’re shaking. Her breath comes in hitching, arrhythmic gulps. She realises she can smell the creature, a pungent mixture of rotting flesh from its breath and the musky scent of its body, and it’s that olfactory reaction which convinces her that this isn’t a dream, a vision or a hallucination. It’s real.

Sophia hears her mother’s voice in her mind: Calm down, love. Get ahold of yourself.

She tries, hard, closing her eyes, taking deep, slow breaths, forcing her hammering heart to return to normal, and she’s nearly there when there’s a thump at the bedroom door behind her, and the sound of scratching, like claws on wood.

This time Sophia can’t help screaming, a white, thin shriek of utter terror as the thump comes again and the scratching comes again and she backs away from the door, frantically scanning her room for anything she might use to defend herself, reaching for the chair at her bedside table, not that it’ll help, it won’t help a bit, the lion’s gonna break through and tear her to shreds, but she lifts it anyway, holds it stiff-armed in front of her, certain that the lion will break through the door at any moment and it’s then that she realises that it’s the branches of the apple tree in the front drive that are clattering against the windowpane, making the scratching, and the thump against the closed bedroom door is just the wind coming through the open fanlight, and the relief is like a breaking wave, and Sophia drops the chair and slumps to the floor.

Sophia lays there for a few moments, jelly legs curled beneath her, trying not to cry, and then, shakily, regains her feet, picking up the chair and returning it to its place by her bedside table. She regards herself in the mirror again, tear-streaked pale face, yellow ribbon in her hair askew, and puffs out her cheeks. That was bad, she thinks to herself, and then, What am I gonna do?

She replays the image in her mind; the living room, the lion. And she realises that the lion wasn’t the only strange thing she saw down there – there was something else, something that she hadn’t registered in the shock of the lion’s mysterious appearance.

The air of the living room had been shimmering, like a heat mirage above the road surface on a hot day. It glittered and flickered in a ghostly silver glow, shifting in the air, and behind it had come the impression of a golden desert sun – the sunlight Sophia had previously thought was coming through the living room window.

Was that how the lion had appeared? Was that shining vision some kind of doorway, through which it strode somehow from the African savannah to a quiet London suburban house? Perhaps, Sophia thinks, the rushing, roaring sound which had pricked her consciousness had been the thing opening – a crack in the skin of the world. She doesn’t know how that could be – it’s impossible.

But then, a lion snoring on her living room rug is also impossible, but it’s there. So, she thinks, she should probably retire the word impossible for the afternoon.

What does she do next?

She could call the police or the fire brigade, but her phone’s charging in the kitchen. As the kitchen is on the other side of the living room, it and her phone may as well be on the far side of the moon. Sophia’s a brave girl but trying to tiptoe past a sleeping lion is beyond her. Also out, at this point, is trying to sneak out the front door. Sophia can feel her legs quivering beneath her – she’s not up to a confrontation.

Could she try and clamber out of the window and try to climb or leap down to the front drive? That’s a non-starter – most likely she’ll break her neck trying to swing from the guttering.

Sophia is stuck. She’ll have to wait until Mum gets home – call out the window when she hears the car pulling in and get Mum or Simon to call for help. She hopes that the thing doesn’t wake up in the meantime, she thinks, wringing her hands –

There’s a sharp little pain in her right hand, and wetness. Sophia looks down at her hands with dawning horror.

A splinter has pierced the pad of her thumb, and it’s drawn blood. Not a lot – it’s a thin little shard of wood – but it’s dunk into her flesh, and bright red blood is dripping onto her bedside table.

Shitshitshitshitshit, her mind gibbers at her, along with a vivid, red-streaked thought – how good is a lion’s sense of smell?

She must stop the bleeding, cover the wound. Sophia grabs frantically at the tissue box on the corner of her bedside table, overturns it. Damn! The damn thing’s empty, no tissues remain. Sophia hurls the empty cardboard box at her bed, where it bounces silently and stupidly off one of her pillows and comes to rest on the quilt. In helpless anger Sophia curls her hands into fists, shakes them at her image in the mirror and silently screams her frustration and fear.

When she regains her composure, Sophia asks herself what she can do. Even in the urgency of her terror Sophia cannot bring herself to use a piece of clothing – a scarf, a shirt – to stanch the gently weeping wound from the splinter – she’s sixteen years old and her clothes are precious things. She could use the yellow ribbon that’s tying back her hair, but it’s her favourite, her special one, the ribbon she knows would catch Mark’s eye, and she cannot bear the thought of staining it with her blood.

There’s a box of plasters in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom across the landing, she thinks. She’ll have to use one of those. Even as a part of her mind recoils from the insanity of what she’s considering – her mother’s voice, screaming Are you out of your mind????  – Sophia stands, her right hand curled into a fist to try and protect her injured thumb, and moves to her bedroom door.

In her mind’s eye she can see the bathroom, door open, twelve feet away across the landing, in between Mum and Dad’s room, and Simon’s. She’ll have to skirt with the top of the staircase to get there.

You sure you want to do this? Sophia asks herself, and she nods. She curls her left hand around the door handle, and gently twists it, careful not to move the door until she’s pulled it all the way around. Her blood is roaring in her ears. Sophia slowly opens the door wide and steps onto the landing. Her fingernails are digging into the palms of her hands, and her knuckles are snow-white with tension. Breathless, with every single sense in her tingling and trembling like telephone wires in a high wind, Sophia tiptoes across the face of the staircase. It takes aeons. It takes three seconds. She can’t hear a thing from downstairs to her right.

Sophia steps to the bathroom and pushes the door close just as she hears the rushing, roaring sound come again. She wonders: is that the shimmering doorway, or portal, whatever it was, opening again? Then she closes the door to the bathroom silently shut and turns to the cabinet.

The box of plasters is there. With shaky hands, Sophia pulls out a plaster and applies it to her thumb, curling it around tight. She adds a second for good measure, and then slumps down onto the toilet seat. She is utterly exhausted.

If that shining thing is a doorway, Sophia thinks, maybe the lion will wander back through it to wherever it came from. Even as she articulates the thought, Sophia knows it is futile. Why would a lion trade a nice comfy rug for the wilds of the plains? Especially when there’s a tasty girl it can hunt and eat when it wakes up. That stupid lion isn’t going anywhere, she knows. If I want rid of it, I’ll have to make it go away.

Sophia gathers her strength and focus. She hasn’t a clue how she might do it, but somehow she is determined to force the lion back from wherever it came.

What about the airhorn? her mind asks her – not in her mother’s voice, this time, but her brother’s. Yes, perhaps that might work. Last summer her brother bought one of those stupid air horns off Amazon, and nearly drove everybody mad by constantly blasting it at everyone during her dad’s birthday barbecue. Like most teenagers, Simon’s attention was soon distracted by some other thing, and the airhorn became just another discarded toy or gadget, tossed into the back of the cupboard and forgotten.

But if Sophia can get it, perhaps she can use it. Perhaps its blaring, insistent noise might be enough to scare or annoy the lion enough that it stalks back across the living room and through the shimmering portal back whence it came.

Sophia stands up, pale, tall, and beautiful in her fear. She gently opens the bathroom door – the landing is empty and quiet. Before she’s aware that she’s doing it, Sophia has moved to the staircase and hopped down a couple of stairs, driven by a wordless, inchoate imperative: she has to see the lion again, she has to make sure that she hasn’t dreamed the whole thing up after all.

Sophia peeks through the baluster slats into the living room. She sees a glittering silver ball floating in the air in the centre of the room, a rushing sound like a faraway waterfall coming from it. Warm golden sunlight shines out from the centre of the portal.

The lion isn’t stretched out on the living room floor; it’s sprawled, snoring, across the sofa, the three-month-old gorgeous grey pearl SweetPea & Willow sofa that Mum had picked out especially, that Dad had grumbled nearly bankrupt the family. The lion’s claws have ripped great tearing tufts of fine fabric from the seats.

Despite her terror, Sophia nearly guffaws out loud at the absurdity of the sight before her.

Creeping backwards up the stairs with her fist to her mouth, she thinks: Mum’s gonna have kittens when she sees that!

She collapses through the door of her brother’s bedroom, falls to the floor against the closed door with her hands across her mouth, and stifles, somehow, the lunatic giggles that rise from her belly.

Then she stumble/crawls across the room to the cupboard where she desperately hopes the airhorn lives.

It seems to take forever to tear through old football boots, sticker albums, tattered clothes but there, finally, at the bottom, she spies the red curve of the horn, red text against the white labelling of the can.

Sophia grasps it – also picking up an old cricket bat stained with red blotchy marks that look like dried blood – and thus weaponised, pulls herself to her feet.

She moves to the top of the landing and stops at the top of the stairs, her thumb throbbing, her legs shaking, but her mind focused and clear.

Okay, kid, Sophia tells herself in her mother’s voice, let’s do this.

Sophia takes the stairs, slowly but without hesitation. As she descends, she sees the shining portal has grown in size, and the rushing sound is louder. And, she sees, the lion is now awake, its brilliant golden eyes regarding her.

The lion unfolds itself up on the sofa, shakes itself awake, the long, powerful muscles of its back legs flexing as it does, its ears flickering, its glorious mane rustling, and it leaps nimbly down. Its tufted tail swishes behind it as the lion regards Sophia, now standing at the bottom of the stairs. Sophia can see it tensing, lowering its body as if to pounce.

The lion’s roar fills the world.

Sophia knows this is it – if she has any chance of forcing it back through the portal, she must act.

Holding the air horn in her left hand, Sophia raises it and depresses the plunger at the top of the can.

And no sound issues from the can.

❦

Karen Adkins shoulders open the front door with a weary shove, woman-handling the four Tescos bags unsteadily as she navigates the porch. Since Simon pleaded with her to let him go to McDonalds with his teammates after the game, she’s been left to do the shopping alone. Again.

‘Sophia!’ she calls. ‘If you’re here, can you help me with the shopping?’

There’s no answer from the empty house before her – only a low, muted roaring, like a jet airliner taking off, from far away.

She must have gone out already, Karen thinks. Although she could have helped out with the cleaning, she thinks. Put the bins out at least. There’s a faint awful smell coming from somewhere, like rotting meat.

Karen stops her grumbling as she enters the living room and the bags tumble to the floor as she sees the devastation that has become of her sofa – rips and tears and shreds in the fabric, it’s a ruin.

Karen’s just about to raise her fists and scream in uncomprehending fury when she sees something else on the ruffed-up living room rug.

Karen bends to pick it up.

It’s a bright yellow ribbon.

And it’s stained with blood.