The Brothers Grimm's "Frau Trude" — KHM 43, forty-third of a project to film all 240 Grimm tales, one by one, in canonical order. 100% AI-made on one home GPU (an RTX 3090), $0 marginal cost: nothing was sent to a cloud service and nothing was paid for.
A little girl who is obstinate and inquisitive, and never does what her parents tell her, announces that she will go to Frau Trude, because people say everything about her is so strange. Her parents forbid it — Frau Trude is a bad woman, and if the girl goes to her she is no longer their child — and the girl goes anyway. When she gets there Frau Trude asks why she is so pale, and the trembling child tells her: on the steps she saw a black man, then a green man, then a blood-red man — a collier, a huntsman, a butcher, says Frau Trude — and through the window she saw not Frau Trude but, as she verily believes, the devil himself with a head of fire. Oho, says Frau Trude: then thou hast seen the witch in her proper costume. I have been waiting for thee a long time; thou shalt give me some light. She changes the girl into a block of wood, throws it into the fire, sits down close to it and warms herself, and says: That shines bright for once in a way.
The text is Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation (public domain), unabridged: all 301 words — the shortest tale in the project so far, about two and a half minutes. Four voices on four bases: a dry, level narrator who never warns; the girl, bright and pert and then very small; the father's one stern line; and Frau Trude, pitched down with an edge on her voice — mild, dismissive, delighted, hungry, and at the last content.
The music is generated by ACE-Step 1.5, a local music model, from a written treatment — the series alternates its two scoring methods tale by tale, and this odd-numbered tale has the generated score: a nursery rhyme that goes wrong. A music-box celesta tune for the girl's curiosity, darkened by a low clarinet-and-bassoon chorale when her parents forbid her; col legno strings ticking like footsteps on the road to the crooked house; a dry harpsichord for Frau Trude answering three dark colour chords — contrabassoon, horn, muted trumpet — for the black, the green and the blood-red man; a swell of tremolo strings and organ for the head of fire; a slow cruel waltz for the witch's welcome; timpani, a crash and crackling brass for the change and the fire; and the music box alone over the embers, ending on one bright cold C major chord. Seven sections, each generated several times and picked by measurement, cut on the picture changes, the last chord released before the picture ends.
The diegetic layer is synthesized end to end: the snug cottage with its hearth and clock, the girl's quick feet, the father's hand on the table, the garden gate clapping shut behind her, the road through the bare wood, the tall house's shutters and wind, its black door swinging open, the stone steps, the glass of the lit window, the gown, the crack of the change and the block of wood on the flagstones, the block flung into the fire, the blaze, and an old woman's stool drawn up to the hearth.
The art follows the rule installed twenty-two films ago: the narration is cut into 20 beats of one narrated event each, about seven seconds apiece, and each beat has its own picture whose prompt names the face of that moment. Motion is the default: four fifths of the shots are animated by Wan 2.2 TI2V-5B (32 generations) from a FLUX.1-dev plate judged by a local vision model against the beat's intent and conformed to locked character sheets with Qwen-Image-Edit-2511; the quiet beats are stills with a slow Ken Burns move. The tale's strange bodies are body traits: Frau Trude's head of fire and the girl as a block of firewood each have their own checked cast sheet, and every shot that shows them is checked by the vision model before it ships; the three coloured men are a collier black with coal dust, a huntsman clothed in green and a butcher dyed crimson — colours, never gore.
Build time: 7h 56m, unattended.