St. Albans
A poetic visual journey through time, this film explores parallel lives in modern-day St Albans and its ancient Roman past. Through matched cinematic scenes, it captures the beauty, humour, and humanity that transcend eras.
Coming
2025
My Role
Producer, Director & Writer
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Resurrecting A Roman City
In this film, I’ve used AI not just as a tool, but as a time machine—reconstructing the ancient Roman city of Verulamium, now known as St Albans, with as much photorealistic detail as today’s technology allows. I feel incredibly fortunate to call St Albans my home for a while, and it’s genuinely my favourite city precisely because of its rich, layered history. The idea was to visually echo the lives of people who once walked these same streets over a thousand years ago. By pairing AI-generated scenes of Roman life with real footage of me and my girlfriend out and about in town.
Using AI
This was my first time using AI in a film, and I knew from the start that I didn’t want it to replace real footage—I wanted it to enhance it. The goal was to create something that blended real life with a believable reconstruction of Roman St Albans, and that wasn’t easy. It took around three to four weeks of generating images, refining them, and converting them into video that could sit naturally alongside the live-action shots. The biggest challenge was getting the framing and composition close enough to feel like a true parallel, and making sure the Roman locations felt authentic. Because there’s so little visual reference from that time, we had to lean heavily on creativity and imagination—but always with one eye on historical accuracy. It was slow, detailed work, but incredibly rewarding.
Watch The Film
