Jacek Kadaj
ABOUT
What if the old masters had used a camera instead of a brush? Fourteen paintings. One fly. Five hundred years. THE NEXT SECOND is a eight-minute AI-generated short film. Fourteen masterpieces — from Bosch to Magritte — are restaged as contemporary photographs and then given the one thing painting could never give them: the next second. A fly travels through all of them. She is not a decoration. For five hundred years painters hid a single fly somewhere in the picture — painted so well that people tried to brush it off the canvas. It was their way of saying: look how easily I can fool you.
SELECTED FRAMES — 6 OF 8
PROCESS
It started with my 2024 photo series The Great Painters and the Lens of AI. In it I asked a simple question: what would the old masters have made if they had held a camera instead of a brush? Each still was rebuilt as a contemporary photograph (Nano Banana Pro, Seedream 5.0) and graded against the light of the original painting. Composition and light came from the painting, never its style. The painters' names stayed out of every prompt, because one name pulls the image back into oil paint. Every painting got its own camera language: a locked-off frontal frame for one, a slow push-in for another, a handheld drift for a third. The fly is the thread between them, and it slowly loses its power as the centuries pass. Animation was done mainly in Seedance 2.5, with Kling 3.0 for some shots. The hardest part was the freeze: real people holding still like wax figures while only the fly moves. I generated about 150 stills and 120 video takes and kept 8. I cut Goya, Seurat and two Caravaggios. The narration went through more than ten versions. The fact-heavy drafts were thrown away because they explained what the images already showed. Music: Suno. Voice: ElevenLabs.
Credits
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