# Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

- Date: 2026-11-02
- Type: film
- Credit: Absurd
- Genre: Horror, Drama
- Artists: [Absurd](https://aifilmhistory.org/artist/absurd)
- Made with: Seedance, Nano Banana (on Absurd)
- Post: https://x.com/withabsurd/status/2117311838451081485
- URL: https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-absurd

A nine-minute, mostly black-and-white retelling of Stevenson's story, set in 1933, and a turn for [Absurd](https://aifilmhistory.org/artist/absurd): after the fully generated [The Poison Taster](https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/the-poison-taster), the studio cast real actors and shot them in a warehouse. "Most AI films are bad because AI can't act," Philip of Absurd wrote alongside the release. The film cost $15,324, and he said the live performances saved thousands of dollars in Seedance regenerations.

The shots were planned in Blender before the shoot, and the actors' contracts included permission to use AI on their footage. The team cut the whole film on the raw performances first, and only once the edit was locked ran it through video-to-video to add the Hyde makeup, replace the backgrounds and relight each shot. The relighting prompts were written with an agent from an overhead map of the set, made with Claude, marking where the light and the actors stood, and they kept the performance exactly as filmed while turning flat studio daylight into a storm at dusk lit by one window and one oil lamp. Relighting turned out to be the hardest step, and Philip said that next time they would shoot on a grey set with flat light. The few fully generated shots began as Seedance clips, with frames pulled from them as start images, which he said gave stills they could never get by prompting for an image directly.

Links:
- How it was made: Philip's workflow thread: https://x.com/dopadealer/status/2117313083903553845
- Absurd: https://absurd.com

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Source: https://aifilmhistory.org/entry/dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-absurd
Era: Late 2026 · Prime Time
Last updated: 2026-11-04