The Brothers Grimm's "The Seven Ravens" (Die sieben Raben) — KHM 25, twenty-fifth 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 man with seven sons longs for a daughter, and when one is born she is so sickly that she must be baptized at once. The boys are sent to the spring for the water, squabble over the jug and lose it, and dare not go home; the father, afraid the child will die unbaptized, cries out in his anger that he wishes the boys were all turned into ravens — and hears a whirring of wings. The girl grows up never told she had brothers, until she overhears that she is to blame for their loss. She sets out alone with a ring, a loaf, a pitcher and a little chair, to the end of the world: past the sun, which devours little children; past the moon, which smells the flesh of men; to the stars, which are kind, and whose morning star gives her a chicken's drumstick to open the Glass mountain. She loses it, cuts off her own little finger, and opens the door with that. Inside, a dwarf serves the ravens' dinner on seven little plates; she eats a morsel from each, sips from each glass, and drops her parents' ring into the last. The ravens come home, find a human mouth has been at their plates — and the seventh finds the ring, and wishes their sister were there. She steps out from behind the door, and the brothers are men again.
The text is Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation (public domain), UNABRIDGED: every sentence verbatim and in order. Eight voices, directed by state: the narrator, the father (the curse cried in anger, without weight — that is the horror), the maiden (troubled, then steady), two gossiping women as one voice, the moon pitched far down into an appetite, the morning star bright and kind, a small courteous dwarf, and the seven ravens as one hoarse voice — the seventh the same voice with the rasp gone soft when the ring rolls against his mouth.
The score is a ballad for seven voices: the string orchestra has exactly seven — basses, celli, violas, second violins, first violins, a solo violin, and the violin harmonics — and the seven brothers ARE the strings. Their seven-note motif enters in canon from the basses up through all seven voices at the curse and vanishes into harmonics as the ravens fly; at the restoring it comes down through all seven and lands in a chorale with bells. The sister has a cradle-song in D major that becomes the walking song of her road and the tune the seventh raven remembers. Between them the road passes the sun (brass fortissimo, a cluster that devours), the moon (whole-tone cold: harmonics, col legno ticking, a bassoon that sniffs twice) and the stars (F-sharp major, seven glockenspiel pings on seven little chairs); the Glass mountain is a shimmer of harmonics and a locked diminished seventh that only the knife resolves. A real cadence at the end, released; no fade-out. Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra through sfizz.
The diegetic layer is synthesized end to end: the jug into the well, a whirring of wings (and the wings coming home), raven croaks, the four things she carries, the sun's roar, the cold gust, seven chimes for seven chairs, the knife, the glass door, seven plates and seven glasses, a morsel and a sip, the ring dropped and the ring rolling, and the restoring — a rush of feathers and seven men landing on the floor.
The art follows the rule installed three films ago: the narration is cut into 42 beats, one per narrated event, and each beat has its own picture whose prompt names the face of that moment. 35 of the 42 shots are stills — a FLUX.1-dev plate at native resolution, judged by a local vision model against the beat's intent, conformed to locked character sheets with Qwen-Image-Edit-2511, judged again for identity, anatomy and head-count, upscaled and given a slow Ken Burns move. Only seven — the jug falling, the ravens flying away, the glass door opening, the ring into the glass, the ravens flying home, the ring against the seventh raven's beak, and the restoring — are continued into motion by Wan 2.2 (17 generations). The narration is the clock: each line's measured duration sets every cut and every bar.
Build time: 10h 31m, unattended.