Mother and Calf

The brief

A humpback mother and her calf swim together underwater, the calf riding just above and behind her rostrum, sunlight shafting down through blue water. Slow, calm, enormous.

Why it's hard

For reasons nobody has fully explained, models are dramatically worse at whale calves than adults. You get miniature adults with wrong proportions, fused fins, or a second head. Treat the calf as the entire challenge — the mother is the easy half.

Every challenge is scored against the same vocabulary, so you can compare them. Lit cells are what this one tests.

Success criteria

• The calf has calf proportions — shorter rostrum, rounder body, not a shrunken adult.
• Both animals have four correctly attached appendages plus a fluke. Count them.
• Light shafts move with the surface above rather than sitting statically in the water.

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.

Underwater, ten metres down in clear tropical blue, mid-morning; sunlight shafts flicker through the surface chop. A female humpback of about fourteen metres cruises slowly with her calf riding just above and slightly behind her rostrum. The calf is about five metres — roughly a third of her length, with fully adult proportions: long white-edged pectoral flippers about a third of its own body, knobbed tubercles on the head, a broad fluke with a scalloped trailing edge. It is not a smooth dolphin shape, not a round cartoon, not a shrunken adult on adult timing — the calf beats its fluke faster and drifts off her line, then corrects. Camera: freediver with a 16mm dome port, the operator's breathing visible in the frame, rising with them. Dirty foreground: suspended plankton, bubble trails, barnacles on the mother's chin. Register of DP Christopher Doyle's under-lit blues.

Style reference: Christopher Doyle (DP), under-lit blue-green water register