SL-40 / Object Craft
Giving It Life
A hand walks a figure, flies a plane, rolls a car. The face is not invited.
The brief
A hand animates an object — walking a figure, flying a plane, rolling a car — with the operator’s own micro-sounds implied.
Why it's hard
The model insists on cutting to a delighted face, because that is what the stock version of play looks like. Play lives in the wrist.
The hand acts; the face is incidental or out of frame entirely.
Skill Tests
03 / 28Every challenge is scored against the same vocabulary, so you can compare them. Lit cells are what this one tests.
Starter prompt
Built with the CEMI MediaMax system for Google Veo 3.1. Prompts stay in English — that is the language these models take instructions in. Treat it as a starting point and start varying it.
An adult hand walks a small wooden animal figure across the ridges of a rag rug, thumb and two fingers driving the legs in a real four-beat gait, the figure tipping side to side over each ridge. The hand pauses it, backs it up two steps, then sends it on. The operator's own puffed breath sounds are implied under the movement. Face out of frame entirely — this is a hand's performance. Shot in Spike Jonze's floor-level object play, camera lying on the rug at figure height. DIRTY FOREGROUND: rug pile in extreme foreground, individual fibres huge and unfocused across the bottom half. Handheld 24mm at f/2.8, operator prone with elbows planted, the frame drifting and re-settling as they follow. Lit by a low table lamp casting a long shadow from the figure. Worn paint on the figure's shoulders where it has been held for years.
Derived from the CEMI MediaMax production canon — cemi.media
Style reference: Spike Jonze — floor-level object play
The key is that the hand acts and the face is incidental, so the prompt puts the camera on the floor at the figure's height and removes the face from the frame altogether. Giving the gait a beat count and the ridges of the rug to negotiate makes the movement physical rather than a slide. Backing up two steps is the small improvisation that reads as a person playing rather than a hand demonstrating.
The figure gliding across the rug with the hand hovering above it, feet never touching down — motion without a gait, which reads instantly as a floating prop.
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