SL-38 / Object Craft
Weight Test
Pick it up and feel the heft. The wrist dips before it rises.
The brief
Picking up an object and testing its heft with one small bounce of the wrist.
Why it's hard
AI objects are weightless. They rise at constant speed because nothing in the training signal knows what mass does to a forearm.
The wrist dips before it rises. Name that dip and the object acquires mass.
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.
A hand lifts a squat cast-metal object from a workbench — and the wrist dips under the load before it rises, one small bounce, the forearm tendons setting a beat after the fingers close. The elbow drops toward the ribs to bring the weight in over the body. Shot in Agnès Godard's skin-and-object tactility from Beau Travail: close to the body, not to the face; the head stays at the top frame line, mostly out. DIRTY FOREGROUND: a coil of solder and the blurred lip of an open toolbox occupy the lower third, inches from the lens. Handheld 65mm macro-capable at f/2.8 with visible focus breathing as the object moves toward camera; the operator sways slightly to hold the object's plane. Lit by one clamp lamp camera-left, shadow side left dark. Oxidised grey metal, casting flash unfiled along one seam, machine oil in the knuckle creases.
Derived from the CEMI MediaMax production canon — cemi.media
Style reference: Agnès Godard (Beau Travail) — skin-and-object tactility
Weight in AI video is almost never in the object — it is in the operator's joints, so the prompt directs the dip, the delayed tendon set, and the elbow pulling the load in over the torso. Letting the shadow side stay dark keeps this away from the glossy floating-product look the whole set is fighting. The macro focus breathing gives an optical cue that the object is genuinely travelling through space toward the lens.
A perfectly smooth lift at constant speed with a level wrist — the object reads as hollow polystyrene and the entire challenge fails on frame one.
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