PRYCE — Official Sci-Fi Short Film (2026) // AI Movie: Higgsfield Film Festival Entry

My official entry for the Higgsfield Global Film Festival. — A story about grief, love, and sacrifice — a man and a loyal dog in a dystopian sci-fi world caught in a hard choice between light and loss. — PRYCE — Official Sci-Fi Short Film (2026) | Competition Entry for the Higgsfield AI Global Film Festival. ✨ Context This film exists because of a very good dog called Pryce. He was once with me. The grief is real; the world around it is invented — a dying planet, an evacuation nobody qualifies for, and something very old living underneath a city that forgot it was there. 🎭 Narrative A man and his dog are refused passage off a dying world. He's eligible. The animal isn't — animals have no evacuation index, because animals were never in the system. Rather than leave without him, he walks away from his own escape. Then the dog suggests they build a ship of their own, and for a while they are happy. But the world fails faster than anyone predicted, and the ship has no heart to power it. Looking for one, the dog leads them down into something far older than the city — where a keeper made of water explains that the only core capable of restarting a world is a heart that has never been spent. He looks at the man first. Then at the dog. The film is built on two mirrored choices. Joe gives up his passage for the dog at the beginning. What happens at the end is the answer to it. Neither of them ever knows what the other did. For anyone who has loved an animal and been asked to prove it was worth something. 🎨 Visuals Applied tenebrism and chiaroscuro — near-total black in some scenes, one hard source, no fill, exposure set for the light rather than the face. Tried to achieve a strong contrast in most scenes for the neon lights to pop out better. Three light languages, and they never mix: NEON — magenta, acid green, sodium. Belongs to the system: the gates, the megaliths, the allocation indices projected a hundred metres tall. It never falls on skin. COLD CYAN-BLUE — belongs to the other order: the keeper, the hall beneath the city, and the dog's collar. WARM AMBER — life, and only ever life. The hangar where they build the ship, the field at the end, the last light in the picture. The man's face is never shown. Sealed black helmet with horizontal light bar — calm green at rest, hard red under stress, dim standby when he sleeps. His jaw and mouth stay bare and carry every line he speaks. Dog speaks, but the collar is defective from wear and tear, so sometimes it speaks or has mixed voices. His collar pulses when he speaks, and its colour changes to magenta/purple exactly during on special moments in the entire film. 🎬 Production Solo. Written, directed, generated and cut by one person. EVERYTHING generated on Higgsfield inside the festival window. Seedance 2.5 for shots with omni_reference and character Elements; Soul Cinema for location plates/hero frames/visualization (but scene locations used were mostly inately from Seedance 2.5 generations) ; Seedream 5.0 & Nano Banana Pro for edits and typography. External work is limited to cutting, grading, titles, subtitles, and audio — no AI upscaling, no frame interpolation, no generative fill anywhere outside the platform. Five Elements locked: the man, the dog, the keeper, the battle suit (ending scene), and the collar. Location elements only in some. Almost every location is written out in full inside each shot prompt and generated from text — a decision made after location Elements kept dragging their baked-in light into scenes it didn't belong in. Audio is AI-generated end to end: getting the voices consistently since I just rely on the consistent voice profile in the prompts. A piano score, and a diegetic sound design built to the rule that the film has to still play with the music muted except for narration by the main character. 3–4 internal cuts maximum per generation. One take per shot, then one identical re-run to tell a glitch from a bad prompt. No prompt gets rewritten off a single bad roll. 🔗 Resources · Scene library — 40+ scenes total, main / supplementary / alternates · Visual lock — elements, location plates and hero frames · Narration and score — Suno prompts and the spotting map Every prompt used in this film is kept and logged. Nothing here was made outside the platform or outside the window. 📝 Notes The swarm he fights is not machines. It's the keeper — dozens of him, knee-high to ten metres, all made of the same water. And not one of them ever strikes back. They close, they hold, they absorb, and every blow he lands passes straight through and re-forms behind his fist. He isn't outmatched. He's outlasted by something that was never fighting him. Pryce's consistent raising of his paw is a symbolic gesture of him telling "not yet" or bargaining for more time. PRODUCTION & TECHNICAL CREDITS: • Generated with: ByteDance Seedance 2.5 via Higgsfield.ai — #aimovie #aifilm #higgsfieldai #higgsfield