Incorporeal Man, press kit and info

I’ve just finished making Incorporeal Man, my third film made with Ai and fifth overall. Here is the trailer:

Incorporeal Man was written sometime around 2004-2007 (I don’t remember exactly), and I drew out a storyboard in 2008. I originally intended to shoot it on 16mm and figured it would take about 50-100k to do, which is more money than I have, so I abandoned the project. The storyboard sat in a box until I picked it up in March of 2025 and started creating the movie using Ai tools. It took almost four months to make and is 86 minutes long.

First page of the 2008 storyboard

Page from the 2008 storyboard

The movie follows Jim, a drunk who inexplicably has the ability to walk through walls. Arrogant, manipulative, and selfish, Jim is the opposite of heroic in every way, but feels that his power entitles him to the privileges of a superhero. As the movie begins, he has just left his job as a carnival sideshow performer and hitchhiked to town so that he can catch The Northside Butcher, a serial killer who has been terrorizing the city. Jim then checks into a flophouse and meets Roger, his mentally challenged neighbor, who gets him a job at the shit factory. In the end, his binge drinking, his half-assed attempts to “look for clues” at The Northside Butcher’s crime scenes, and his animosity towards his boss at the shit factory, Vern, collide into a violent finale.

When I was writing the screenplay I wanted to make a movie that has the structure of a superhero movie but the content of a bleak tragedy. I wanted the protagonist to be a completely irredeemable anti-hero, but also have an anti-plot, full of distractions and detours at pivotal points, with every triumph actually getting Jim further from his goal until there is nowhere to go but down. The story arc is intended to be similar to Taxi Driver’s - the loser protagonist has a target, fails, then selects an easier target and everything gets bloody.

The next step after finding the storyboard was creating the characters. For Jim, I used various prompts to get a person who had been drinking for years, then replaced the inner part of the face with my own.

Roger has a longer history. I started by creating a MidJourney image that used my own picture as well as a picture of a blobfish as character reference images, combining them. I was just messing around when I did this, it was before I decided to make Incorporeal Man. I liked the character that resulted and used it in two short movies I made, In The End It Turned Out The Whole Thing Was A Car Commercial, and The One-Electron Universe. When I took *that* character and used it itself as Roger’s character reference image in Incorporeal Man, I got a different look for Roger each time. I thought this was great, it was aligned with my original intention to have different actors play Roger, but each one wearing a Roger mask.

For Vern, I created a character that was a combination of Leonid Brezhnev and Charles II of Spain. For Theresa, the rainbow-haired woman in the bar, I used images of Vanessa Steinhilb, the painter. The rest of the characters are original creations with no reference image used.

The voices all came from 11labs. I used default voices for some minor characters, or re-used voices I already had from another project. I designed a few voices just for this movie, like Jim’s, and I used some cloned voices of people who lease their voices to 11labs - Leoni Vergara’s voice was used for Kelly (from the bar), and someone called “Cole - Gritty-Rough-Strong” was used for Roger. For a number of voices, I cloned my own voice but speaking in an altered tone. Theresa’s voice is me speaking in a falsetto voice, the pawn shop owner is me speaking in a raspy smoker’s voice, the bartender is me speaking in a guttural voice, and the convenience store clerk is me with a teenage dork voice. All the dialog was spoken by me, then transferred to the character voice using 11labs’ voice changer feature, which preserves intonation but alters the voice.

Images were created in MidJourney, using the original 2008 storyboard as a guide. Usually, I was able to get the image to look pretty close to how I had originally imagined it. For a few of the images, I had a specific location in mind when I was writing the screenplay, so I took photos of those locations and edited them in MidJourney.

I used a number of video apps at various points including Runway, Sora, Pixverse, and Luma Labs, but most of the video was made with Pika’s frames feature, which allows you to use up to five keyframes in creating a video up to 20 seconds long. I have some issues with Pika as a company, but this is by far the best model for prompt adherence - the stuff you see coming out of other video models can look prettier, but it is less likely to be what you want. The added control does make it take much longer though - virtually every shot in the movie involved heavy editing in Photoshop, using the MidJourney images as raw material. I sort of fell into a classic animation paradigm for the more complicated shots, where I’d create the background, then put the characters on top in another layer and move them around to create the keyframe images which went into Pika

Most of the music is non-Ai, public domain recordings of classic music recorded over a century ago. I got the idea to use Flight Of The Bumblebee from 1940s Green Hornet serials when I was writing the script, but I didn’t get the idea to use scratchy classical recordings as an ongoing theme until I started putting it together in 2025. I used Suno to create Ai music in four ways for this movie: One, I took a public domain recording of Paul Hindemith’s Thema Mit Variationen, slowed it down, and used Suno to make a remake of that. The result is the first bar song you hear. Two, I created two songs directly in Suno with no outside influence, and that is the other bar songs. Three, I used a public domain recording of pop-goes-the-weasel and used Suno to remake it in a style that would sound more natural coming out of a toy. Four, in the scene where I used Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, I create a recording which begin with the song, had a gap, and then had the ambulance siren sound effect. I brought that in Suno and filled in the gap with an Ai-generated section, so that it seems to flow from music to sound effect.

All the sound effects were made in 11labs.

Check this page or my YouTube channel to see when the movie is released to the public.

If you have questions or want to interview me about the movie, I have a gmail account and the part before the @ symbol is zebharadon

still images: