> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.thedaringcreatives.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Mathery Made Where Knights Fall Without Building a Set - URL: https://www.thedaringcreatives.com/creator-stories/mathery-where-knights-fall-ai-short-films/ - Published: 2026-11-02T14:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-02T13:59:59.000Z - Description: Mathery (@mathery___) is Erika Zorzi and Matteo Sangalli, a Milan and Brooklyn duo who spent years building sets, chairs and museum rooms by hand. Since 2025 they have been making short films with AI, and Where Knights Fall won Silver at Runway's 2026 AI Festival. - Author: William Smith - Tags: Creator Stories, artist profile, ai filmmaking, short film, comedy, commercial directors, runway, midjourney, chatgpt, #medium:Short film, #method:Mixed, #handle:@mathery___, #tool:Runway, #tool:Midjourney, #tool:ChatGPT, #issue-2026-10 Mathery is two people, Erika Zorzi and Matteo Sangalli. For more than a decade they made things you could touch: a playroom for an art museum, a chair, a line of homewares, and commercials for Google, IKEA and KFC. All of it needed a real set, real materials and a crew. Since 2025 they've also been making short films with AI, roughly one every month or two. They write and direct them, and almost everything on screen is generated. One of them, *Where Knights Fall*, won Silver at Runway's 2026 AI Festival. Two of their films show the change. Their live-action short [*Blue or Green*](https://mathery.it/project/blue-or-green-short/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) credits sixteen people besides the two directors, from actors to camera crew. Their AI film [*Save the Queen*](https://vimeo.com/1168031835?ref=thedaringcreatives.com), released this February, credits a sound studio and three people who did the sound and titles. Their own description of it says it was "written and directed by Mathery, entirely AI generated." They met at university in Milan and now split their time between Milan and Brooklyn. They post their films [on their Vimeo channel](https://vimeo.com/mathery?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) and they're [@mathery\_\_\_ on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/mathery%5F%5F%5F/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) (three underscores). ## What they made before AI [Their Wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathery?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) lists commercials for Google, IKEA, Jaguar, Deloitte, Target and KFC. Alongside the ads, they designed physical things. In 2014 the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne asked them to build [a kids' room called Pastello – Draw Act](https://mathery.it/project/pastello-draw-act/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com). Children drew with melted oil pastels using odd machines Mathery designed. They made the room, the furniture, the graphics and the film, and it won an IDEA award. They also made [the Josie Chair](https://mathery.it/project/josie-chai/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com), a wooden chair that puts out a burst of color when you sit on it. The same museum bought their fruit-shaped homewares, Fruit Wares, for its permanent collection. [Their about page](https://mathery.it/about/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) sums up what they're after. They see "each scene as an opportunity to observe the world we know and transform it into one we don't, one that's filled with mystery, irony, and satire." ## Their first AI film: a bikini made of pigeons *A Feather and a Prayer* (2025) is set in a world where the summer's must-have swimsuit is a bikini made of live pigeons. A woman loses one of her pigeons at the beach and calls customer service. The agent who answers, [as Chroma Art Film Festival describes her](https://chromaartfilmfestival.org/2025/05/30/a-feather-and-a-prayer-by-mathery-absurdist-fashion-satire-in-the-age-of-ai/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com), works out of a gas station in rural America and couldn't care less. [Shots reported](https://shots.net/news/view/matherys-feathery-fashion-faux-pas?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) how they made it. ChatGPT helped write the script. The images came from Runway and Midjourney, and Runway turned them into video. For the phone call they used Act-One, a Runway tool that copies a filmed actor's performance onto a generated character. Runway also made the narrator's voice. [The Stable added](https://www.thestable.com.au/1stavemachine-directors-motherly-show-what-directing-mastery-and-ai-can-do-together/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) that only the graphics, titles, music and sound were made the traditional way. "Far from being a threat to creativity, making this film showed us how AI can augment it," Zorzi told Shots. The laurels on its Vimeo poster include Best Actor and Best Comedy from the AI International Film Festival in July 2025. Mathery — *A Feather and a Prayer* (2025), on Vimeo ([vimeo.com/mathery](https://vimeo.com/mathery?ref=thedaringcreatives.com)) ## How they get the AI to match their style They haven't posted a behind-the-scenes video for any of these films. The best account of how they work is a Q&A they did with [Little Black Book](https://www.lbbonline.com/news/Mathery-on-Artistic-Integrity-and-AI?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) in May. At first they gave the AI their own photos to copy, so the results would look like their work. "At the start of our AI experimentation, we were using images and stills from our own work to give the model a 'pure' reference, and for us to actually get something in our own style, one that we have built over the years," they said. Later they dropped that step and put the work into the written prompt: "we spend a lot of energy prompting art direction and location descriptions, as well as characters' styling and everything that speaks to our aesthetic." The sets, costumes and props they used to build, they now describe in words. It doesn't always come out the way they pictured. Sometimes, they said, "we find something we like and live with it as a compromise." On a real shoot, they said, an idea gets "translated and evolved by the production designer, art director, set builder, stylists, actors' interpretations, the use of real locations, the DP's eyes." With AI, that team isn't in the room. ## They edit while they generate The most important skill, they told LBB, is "to know how to prompt and edit basically simultaneously, which is what we do." As each clip comes out, they drop it into the edit to see if it works. Many clips don't. Here's their list of what goes wrong: "sometimes a voice sounds off, the acting is not great, at times something odd appears out of nowhere, a secondary actor transforms into a different person or drifts out of the scene." Once a clip holds up in the edit, they move on to the next scene. They keep the AI to their own projects. "We do not use AI in our daily tasks," they said, and "for now we have heavily used AI only on personal projects." They still shoot live action too. Their comedy *The Cranberry Effect*, about a detective more interested in a roast chicken recipe than the diner massacre she's investigating, was made with a full crew and [is playing festivals](https://mathery.it/project/the-cranberry-effect/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com). ## A new film every month or two After the pigeons, they kept going: - ***Salt*** (September 2025): a merman checks into a hotel at the end of mermaid season. - ***Shellbound*** (January 2026): a 72-second auction where the big item turns out to be a giant snail shell. - ***The Great Bury*** (January 2026): in a world where nobody has eaten meat in 200 years, a squirrel and his friends try the burgers at a new McDonald's, realize what they're eating, and call the police. The police, led by a lobster, bury the restaurant. - ***Save the Queen*** (February 2026), their longest at nine minutes: a rich woman in the Hollywood hills won't let her three maids leave early for a family party. Then a fallen power line electrifies her pool, and she needs their help to get out. Mathery — *Shellbound* (2026), on Vimeo ([vimeo.com/mathery](https://vimeo.com/mathery?ref=thedaringcreatives.com)) Mathery — *Save the Queen* (2026), on Vimeo ([vimeo.com/mathery](https://vimeo.com/mathery?ref=thedaringcreatives.com)) ## Where Knights Fall *Where Knights Fall* came out in March and runs three and a half minutes. It's a new take on Rapunzel. In [their synopsis](https://mathery.it/project/where-knights-fall-ai/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com), she waits in a tower while the ground below is "thick with the bodies of knights, princesses and princes" who tried to climb up and fell. Then a suitor shows up who "doesn't climb, but he crawls and slides." He's a pale, bald prince with a huge yellow bow. This Rapunzel has a septum ring and metal rings in her braids, and she spends a lot of the film in tears. There's a wedding. Mathery — *Where Knights Fall* (2026), Silver at Runway's AI Festival, on Vimeo ([vimeo.com/mathery](https://vimeo.com/mathery?ref=thedaringcreatives.com)) It won Silver at [Runway's 2026 AI Festival](https://aif.runwayml.com/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com). Gold went to *The Well* by [Dorian & Daniel, another pair of commercial directors](https://www.thedaringcreatives.com/creator-stories/dorian-daniel-the-well-ai-short-film/), and the Grand Prix to Robert Gaudette. It was also selected for the Guanajuato International Film Festival. Mathery haven't said which tools they used on *Where Knights Fall* or any film after their first one. The list below, from *A Feather and a Prayer* in 2025, is the only one on record. Tools credited on A Feather and a Prayer (2025) [Runway](https://runwayml.com/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) (Frames, Gen-3 Alpha Turbo, Act-One, generative audio) · Midjourney · ChatGPT As reported by Shots and The Stable at the film's release. Mathery haven't published a tool list for the later films. ## What they're making now In the LBB interview, they said the first work AI takes over will be "a large portion of commercials that do not require specific stories or emotions, but instead focus on aesthetics or fast-paced vignettes." Full films are another matter, because "human acting is far too complex to replicate." They've started making those kinds of ads themselves. In January they posted *Pickle it up*, an ad for a made-up pickle brand. In September they posted *Vero Factory*, a 30-second AI ad for another invented product, which got [an honorable mention](https://mathery.it/project/vero-factory/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) in Runway's Big AD contest.