ThinkingHat
ABOUT
THE LEG is a short film created using generative AI, inspired by the true story of Hani, a child from the Gaza Strip who, at less than a year old, was hit by shrapnel from a bomb and lost a leg. After this tragedy, Hani arrived in Italy with his parents, his two sisters, aged 10 and 3, and his 6-year-old brother. Hani lost a leg, but not because he was distracted. Hani lost a leg because humanity is distracted. The film was born from the desire to convey the authentic and uncontaminated perspective of children faced with what is incomprehensible to them. It transforms the brutality of reality into a poetic, accessible, and universal language, capable of speaking to anyone without the need for explanation. In a domestic and familiar world, inhabited by stuffed animals, games, and small daily adventures, loss transforms into research, connection, and possibility. THE LEG does not attempt to explain war. Rather, it seeks to restore what continues to survive despite it: the ability to imagine, to adapt, to reinvent one's way of being in the world. It is an intimate and symbolic story that transforms a wound into movement, and a loss into a new form of freedom.
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PROCESS
The creative process started from a true story. After an initial broad brainstorming phase, we focused on how to transform a specific event into a story that could resonate with everyone, while preserving its emotional impact. In the early stages, we created a hand-drawn storyboard to define the rhythm, framing, and key moments of the narrative. From there came the decision to use stuffed animals as the protagonists: characters capable of telling the story through a simple, immediate, and universal visual language. After an in-depth visual research phase, we began generating the individual characters, before moving on to the environments and all the necessary props. It was an intense process of exploration and selection: more than 10,000 generations were produced to find the right visual identity, along with over 20,000 Runway credits used throughout production. Once all the assets had been defined, we used Runway to reconstruct and animate them, progressively bringing each scene to life and transforming the initial concept into a coherent, emotional, and universal visual story.
Credits
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