Lunge Feed

The brief

A humpback lunges up through a dense cloud of krill with its mouth wide open and throat pleats ballooning outward, bubble-net columns rising around it. Frame it from below against the bright surface.

Why it's hard

The throat expansion is a specific, unusual deformation that models rarely render — they tend to give you an open mouth on a rigid body. The krill cloud is also a particle problem layered on top of a creature problem.

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

Success criteria

• Ventral pleats visibly expand and then relax — the throat is not a rigid surface.
• Krill behave as a reactive cloud, parting around the animal rather than sitting as texture.
• Backlight through the surface separates the whale from the water column.

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.

Cold northern inlet at first light under low cloud, glassy water broken by a rising ring of bubbles about twelve metres across. Two humpbacks burst upward through the ring almost vertically, mouths open near ninety degrees, ventral throat pleats ballooning outward into a pouch twice the width of the head, dark baleen plates visible along the upper jaw, seawater and silver krill spilling over the lower lip; gulls drop into the gape. Shoot from a small boat at water level, 70mm, handheld, the operator caught late and correcting upward so the lunge partly overshoots the top of frame. Dirty foreground: a wet bow cleat, a coil of rope, spray beaded on the filter. Materials: mottled grey-black skin, barnacle scarring, old rake marks. Register of DP Roger Deakins' overcast northern greys. No sun, no slow motion beyond a brief ramp at the apex.

Style reference: Roger Deakins (DP), overcast northern-latitude greys