Lucas Levitan's best-known project started as a prank. For Photo Invasion, he takes other people's photos and draws his own little characters into them, and he's been doing it long enough to have crowdfunded and sold out a book of them. He posts as @lucaslevitan on Instagram.
In 2026 he put small characters into a film instead. Little Mes runs four minutes and nineteen seconds, and he co-directed it with Fabián Jiménez for a five-person group called Salad.
The look is built to read as handmade, carved wood and cardboard and clay, all of it made with generative tools. The team also published an unusually specific credit list, so you can see who wrote it, who generated it, who cut it and who scored it.
Who made Little Mes
The credits got muddled in a couple of places. The Reply AI Film Festival's finalist announcement credits Salad Collective, a studio and directors' collective in Spain. The Curious Refuge gallery entry names Levitan alone.
Both are partly right. The description on the film's YouTube upload credits Lucas Levitan and Fabián Jiménez as directors and calls it a Salad Collective production. The film opens on a card reading "A Salad Collective production."
The full list sits on the Little Mes page of Levitan's site:
- Written and art directed by Lucas Levitan
- AI creative execution by Fabián Jiménez, Lucas Levitan and Zehh Castro (the film's end card calls it "Generative Design")
- Edited by Fabián Jiménez, Alejandro Tarraf and Zehh Castro
- Music and sound design by Carina Levitan
Carina is Lucas's sister; he says so in the description of Pingo de Esperança, a children's video book he co-wrote and she did the sound design for. The film was made in collaboration with the production company SpecialGuestX.
Jiménez's Instagram bio lists camera department work, AI art, and a creative partner role with Runway.
A wooden man in a blue room
The film opens on a puppet-like man with a carved wooden face, round glasses and a brown knit sweater, sitting at a small table in a room of blue painted planks under one hanging lamp. The team calls him Marlo. Most of the film is his inner monologue, spoken over the images, and it starts plainly: "I'd like to introduce myself. I am me."
He says he's happy. Then he starts listing the turns he didn't take, and each one becomes its own small stage.
"What if I had chosen to be a dentist, like my grandfather was?" puts a dentist under a lamp, peering into a giant set of teeth. Quitting guitar lessons becomes a figure swimming after a floating guitar through a sea of crumpled paper. A wish to be a veterinarian gets a pink feathered bird on a shelf, and nature photography gets a jungle of cardboard leaves and grinning clay creatures.
Near the end, a crowd of tiny figures, each a different version of him, climbs over his body while he sits in his chair. "Not one or two. Many. Many little me's."
The narration is the one thing the team hasn't explained. The end credits don't name a voice, and none of the posts say who or what speaks for Marlo. Levitan's teaser captions list ElevenLabs among the tools, which suggests a generated voice, but nobody on the team has said so.
Salad, the five-person collective
Levitan describes Salad on his site's Salad page as "a collective called Salad, in which 5 artists, filmmakers, sound designers and screenwriters work together to explore the possibilities of Artificial Inteligence." Little Mes is one of several projects listed there, alongside a series about forgotten objects in a drawer and a short about a fish looking for a home.
The group posts as @_wearesalad on Instagram, with the bio "A place where people searching for the Tin Man's heart come together to experiment and explore." Their launch post puts the belief in one line: "AI doesn't replace the creative, it sharpens them."
When Levitan introduced the group on his own account, he called it "a creative lab or perhaps a collective" and said "Little Mes is the short film we created as a team."
The sets were built from memory
Salad posted the film's pieces as a series of carousels. The one on the film's sets explains how they thought about locations: "These sets were not found, they were remembered."
The same caption calls it "A different kind of recce, moving through internal spaces instead of real ones." That fits the film. Several of the worlds Marlo imagines sit inside a frame of some kind, a window, a mouth, a curtained stage, so the alternate lives play out like rooms in his own head.
Salad Collective — the sets of "Little Mes," via Instagram (@_wearesalad)
The creatures got their own post. In that carousel, Salad writes that they are "Small creatures shaped by doubt, curiosity, and all the paths that never happened." Each one, the caption says, "holds a version of a life, quietly active in the background."
Salad Collective — the creatures of "Little Mes," via Instagram (@_wearesalad)
Levitan posted the cast too. His carousel of the characters opens with "These are the actors that create our story."
Lucas Levitan — the characters of "Little Mes," via Instagram (@lucaslevitan)
Three teasers and a tool list
The film took shape in public. Levitan posted the first teaser in early March, calling it "Part experiment. Part film. Part exploration." He opened the caption with "This began as an idea we couldn't let go of."
That caption is also where he named the stack: Google Gemini, Veo 3, Nano Banana, Higgsfield, Kling, ChatGPT, Seedance 2.0, ElevenLabs and Epidemic Sound, "and more along the way." He described the tools as "ways to open doors we hadn't walked through before."
A later clip post in March borrowed a line straight from the script, written in the first person: "Sometimes I wonder if I hadn't quit guitar lessons… would I be playing somewhere today?"
Tools Levitan credits himself
Veo 3 · Nano Banana · Kling · Seedance 2.0 · Higgsfield · ElevenLabs · ChatGPT · Epidemic Sound
From his captions on the Little Mes teasers, March 2026. Reply's finalist listing names Kling, Veo 3.1, Seedance and Suno; the film's own credits give music and sound design to Carina Levitan.
When the finished film went up in May, Levitan's post with stills and clips summed up the months before it: "a lot of testing, breaking things, figuring out what actually works. This project pushed us further than expected."
Photo Invasion came first
Levitan's about page describes him as "a Brazilian illustrator and creative director based in Madrid, with over 20 years of experience blending advertising and art." He spent four years at Meta as a creative strategist, and lists agencies including Wieden+Kennedy, McCann London and R/GA.
On the Photo Invasion page, he calls each piece "a one-frame story where I take other people's photos and add my own illustrations to twist the original meaning in a playful, unexpected way." Little Mes runs on a similar move: one ordinary scene, a man in a room, with small invented figures dropped into it until the meaning changes.
His recent AI work runs alongside commercial jobs. The Salad page says he's been working with SpecialGuestX on clips for Google Flow, and he writes that "Despite having more than 20 years of experience in the creative industry, this has been one of the most rewarding and creatively stimulating projects I've ever worked on."
Where Little Mes has screened
Runway's AI Festival picked it as one of ten finalists, and the 2026 winners list shows it took one of five Merit awards. Levitan posted after the ceremony about "Seeing Little Mes on the big screen at Lincoln Center." Later in June he took the film to Annecy for a panel at the Dreamina AI International Animation Summit, held alongside the animation festival.
At the Reply AI Film Festival in Venice it was one of ten finalists, and it didn't place; the winners announcement lists the prizes. Since then, Salad has posted two wins: the Best Film Critics' Award at Merge Film Festival in Switzerland, and the Animation Film Award at the World AI Movie Festival on October 8.
Marlo's festival run overlapped with another character's. Robert Gaudette's A Face Only A Mother Could Love won Runway's Grand Prix and Reply's top prize, and Levitan's Venice post has Marcel and Marlo meeting again after New York. We covered how Gaudette made his Paris dancer film separately.
Levitan says he's now putting together a short documentary on how he builds his worlds. In the post announcing it, he lists the stages as "from an idea, to sketches, experiments, characters, sets, mistakes, and eventually something that feels real." He's starting with Little Mes.