The Steps

The brief

Build a montage of a crowd flooding down a vast stone staircase, cutting between the mass and the individual: wide geometry of bodies, then a single face, then boots, then the whole descent again. The cut is the point — rhythm creates the tension, not the action.

The source sequence

Study the technique, not the copy. Rebuild the blocking, the lens, the movement and the rhythm — not the performances.

Why it's hard

Crowds are where generative video falls apart: bodies merge, limbs get shared, people walk through each other. Sustaining a coherent crowd across multiple cuts, on a staircase, in period costume, is about as hard as it gets today.

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

Success criteria

• No merged bodies, shared limbs, or people passing through each other.
• The staircase keeps consistent geometry and direction across every cut.
• Scale reads: the wide shots feel monumental against the close-ups.

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.

A monumental granite harbour staircase, over a hundred steps, 1905, hard midday sun. Hundreds of civilians in long coats and headscarves pour downward in one current; boots strike stone unevenly, a lost hat is trampled, dust lifts off the risers. Cut on rhythm between three scales: an extreme wide from the head of the stairs where the crowd reads as a single flowing mass; a hip-height wide-angle inside the crowd, coat wool brushing the lens as dirty foreground; a hard low angle at step level as a loose handcart bounces down riser by riser toward camera. Register of Sergei Eisenstein and DP Eduard Tisse: orthochromatic black and white, blown white sky, sooty blacks, hand-cranked 18fps with slight speed unevenness, visible emulsion grain and one or two scratches. Uncoated vintage glass. No dialogue — the cutting rhythm carries the meaning.

Style reference: Sergei Eisenstein (dir.) / Eduard Tisse (DP), 1925 montage of scale contrast