Love Bytes: AI-mée is Heartless
A robot who generates images of love sets out to steal a heart, and discovers that connection cannot be plugged in.
“Remember now, kids, don't force what won't fit.”
Synopsis
In a house made of metal, with a roof made of tin, Aimée, a young robot girl with metal skin and electrical wires for hair, spends her days at the computer generating images of love and desire. But there is no heart inside her metal attire. The wise database gives her three options: the heart of a being, a heart made of gold, or the heart of the ocean.
So Aimée sets out to get one. She captures a dove and takes its heart, but it needs to be hardwired. She breaks into a bank vault for a golden heart, too heavy for her empty chest. She dives to a shipwreck in a suit of plastic, and finds nothing there to keep. At dawn she understands that no physical heart is needed, only accepting who she is. But her crimes have been discovered, and she is taken away to jail.
A tale from the Dr. Tellington series. First made with Pika Labs in 2024, the rhymed fable was rebuilt in 2026 as 1960s puppet stop-motion, in the spirit of Rankin/Bass Animagic and Jiří Trnka.
Stills
Film Info
- Direction
- Melody Bossan (LeMoon)
- Screenplay
- Dina Lockamy
- Studio
- Ethereal Moon Films
- Date
- August 18, 2026
- Genre
- Short film · Dr. Tellington series
- Music
- Suno
- Running time
- 4:47
- Format
- 4:3
- Language
- English · FR subtitles
Creative Process
Why remake it
In 2024 we used Pika Labs to tell the story of a machine that generates images of love and cannot feel it. In 2026 we make our living with machines that generate images. The fable has become a self-portrait of the medium, which is why we rebuilt it for (Dis)Connection.
The look
Rankin/Bass Animagic, Jiří Trnka and Ladislas Starewitch: ball-jointed puppets, porcelain faces, staccato motion at about 12 fps, camera wobble, 16 mm grain and a 4:3 frame. Aimée was designed in about 90 minutes on 10 June 2026, with her blue enamel doll face, silver hair and sequined red cowboy boots.
The tools
Verses by Dina Lockamy, with help from ChatGPT. Character design in Midjourney and Nano Banana on Krea, assembled in Photoshop. Images in Krea K2 with custom LoRAs, Nano Banana 2 and GPT Image 2, upscaled in Magnific. Video in Seedance 2.0 on Higgsfield and Dreamina. Narrator voice in ElevenLabs, music in Suno, edit in CapCut.
Authorship
The poem, the character choices and the final selection of every shot are ours. A film about a machine that cannot force a connection took constant human correction to make, and that is part of its subject.