Exploring VEO3 Through Tarkovsky’s Lens
You can get a 3-month special on the Gemini ULTRA package and you can create VEO3 videos in their new Flow labs tool.
VEO3 invites a new kind of dreaming — one shaped by slowness, silence, and the weight of memory. By using AI prompts inspired by the elemental poetry of Andrei Tarkovsky—the Russian film director, we test not just the limits of the model’s visual fidelity, but its ability to evoke time, longing, and metaphysical stillness. These scenes are not about spectacle — they are about presence, decay, and the ache of something just out of reach.
For each of these prompts I prefaced the text-to-video with “Style: Tarkovsky (slow, symbolic, elemental)”
In a dim underground tunnel, a chorus of identical figures stands facing mirrors, singing a wordless hymn. Each reflection distorts slightly differently—one weeps, one smiles, one stares. A narrator intones: “Some truths only appear when you're not looking at them directly.” The sound grows louder until it becomes silence.=
An elderly woman sits on a park bench beside an identical version of herself. Neither speaks. One fades into smoke. The other looks down and finds a child’s shoe in her lap.
A man stands on a beach in perfect stillness as dozens of closed umbrellas rain slowly from the sky, embedding themselves in the sand like arrows. He doesn’t flinch. His own umbrella is open, but torn.
A barefoot man walks through a flooded cathedral filled with televisions showing home videos of people he doesn't recognize. As he passes each screen, the water ripples into color. A single bird flaps overhead. He whispers: “Maybe remembering is just a form of imagining.”
A woman floats motionless just below the surface of a still lake. Above her, a lamp flickers on and off in the sky. Fish swim by with human faces. She opens her eyes as the light dies.
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