Dominant is a story about family, anchored by my dad’s life as a non-conformist artist in Soviet Russia. I wrote this shortly after he died, and I’m finally able to make visuals over a decade later thanks to vidgen AI tools. The entire film was made with OpenAI’s Sora tool without any post effects.

I’ve been wanting to try a “POV” type of piece for a while, and got the opportunity to create this through being a part of the Sora alpha artists program (this film would have never been made otherwise, in the pre-AI days).

It was mostly made with text-to-video straight into the Sora engine, but I also did a fair amount of image-to-video input where I was able to upload his actual paintings INTO the system for a bit of a “image IN video” magic – which added authenticity to some of the POV-style storytelling where I talk about the impact of his paintings on me as a child.

by Nik Kleverov (USA)