Ducharme Roxanne
ABOUT
Drawn into a haunting forest where beauty conceals danger, travelers encounter surreal trials and eerie forces from which few ever escape. WiNTERHOLLOW is a haunting forest where beauty conceals danger, and strange, eerie forces lurk. Travellers, drawn by its glow, face surreal trials and chilling legends, with few ever escaping its grip. Recipient of a Silver Cloud Award at OMNI: AI Film Festival in Sydney, Australia, and Honorable Mentions at the 2025 Project Odyssey and the 2025 Seoul AI International Film Festival.
SELECTED FRAMES — 8 OF 8
PROCESS
WiNTERHOLLOW began with a loose visual board built around a winter folktale and the idea of making a scary story for children, something magical and inviting on the surface, but deeply unsettling underneath. Visually, I was drawn to the glow of Christmas lights reflected in darkness and snow. That became part of the creature design itself: strange spectral beings with small glowing lights integrated into their limbs, moving through the forest like distant holiday lights. I developed the world first in Midjourney, then selected and refined the strongest stills into a sequence before animating them in Kling and Hailuo Minimax. I graded every generation against a simple feeling: did it preserve the logic of a dark folktale? The creatures needed to be strange enough to feel dangerous, but still carry a trace of whimsy. The forest needed to feel enchanted, silent, and alive. I threw away many technically successful generations because they felt too pretty, too literal, too clean, or too conventionally fantasy. The voice-over was shaped with ChatGPT as a rhyming poem, then performed through ElevenLabs. I treated it as part of the visual rhythm rather than simple exposition, aiming for something more eerie than comforting. Working solo with AI let me keep exploring and refining that tension between wonder and dread until the film felt like its own unsettling little winter myth.
Credits
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