> ## 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. # Mike Bennion Found Kev in a Midjourney Face and Let Him Talk - URL: https://www.thedaringcreatives.com/creator-stories/mike-bennion-kev-ai-documentary/ - Published: 2026-10-06T13:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-06T12:59:59.000Z - Description: Mike Bennion (@mikebennion1) spent years directing TV commercials on film. His AI short Kev, a documentary-style portrait of an invented young blind man, started as a Midjourney face, played about 20 traditional festivals, then became a Reply AI Film Festival finalist and a MetaMorph winner. - Author: William Smith - Tags: Creator Stories, artist profile, ai film, ai documentary, short film, veo 3, midjourney, #medium:Short film, #method:Prompt only, #handle:@mikebennion1, #tool:Midjourney, #tool:Veo, #tool:Kling, #tool:Nano Banana, #tool:ElevenLabs, #issue-2026-10 Mike Bennion wanted Kev to be judged as a film before anyone judged how it was made. So before he sent his four-minute portrait of a young blind man to a single AI festival, he sent it to regular ones. By the time he talked to the MetaMorph Award this summer, he said *"it's been in about 20 now and almost no one has spotted its ai. Including the specialist Doc. Festival at the BFI recently."* Kev doesn't exist. Mike, who posts films as [@mikebennion1 on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@mikebennion1?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) and [mikebennion2 on Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/mikebennion2?ref=thedaringcreatives.com), built him from a face, a voice model and a lot of patience. He spent years directing TV commercials in London, mostly shot on film, and his whole AI practice is aimed at one target: footage that looks like it came through a camera lens. That makes him worth studying. A lot of AI film goes after spectacle. Mike goes after small, believable details, and Kev is where that approach paid off. ## Years of ads on film Mike grew up in Cheshire, in the North West of England. He trained as a graphic designer, with a BA from Kingston University and an MA from the Royal College of Art, according to [an artist bio from a group show](https://lorellerau.wixsite.com/reclaimedretold/mike-bennion?ref=thedaringcreatives.com), and he told Curt Doty he was trained as an illustrator at art school too. He says he walked into directing more or less by accident after college. From there it was TV commercials in London. *"I used to shoot this stuff on film with the odd bits of VFX when I directed ads years ago,"* he told MetaMorph. He storyboarded everything by hand, because drawing was his core skill. He doesn't romanticize the ad years. Scripts came to him after committee meetings between client and agency. *"I had very little room to play as an artist,"* he said. *"I was more of a … workhorse than a racehorse."* He tried to get his own features made. In 2006, the [Directors Notes podcast](https://directorsnotes.com/2006/11/09/dn-ep-009-deadwing-mike-bennion/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) interviewed him about Deadwing, an unshot feature he co-wrote with Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree, which they were marketing to prove it had an audience. Talking to Curt Doty about trying to get a feature script off the ground, he said: *"I had that door closed to me for a very long time."* He's lived in the US for about sixteen years, since his wife took a job in Philadelphia when their son was a baby. Mike stopped making commercials, became a stay-at-home dad, and made assemblage sculpture from old, worn objects. The [about page of his art site](https://www.mikebennionart.com/about?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) describes that process in terms that also fit Kev: *"The process is from the sub-conscious, never premeditated, the resolution always a surprise to me."* Then a friend sent him a two-minute AI clip he couldn't figure out, and he went down what he calls the rabbit hole. ## The film Kev talks to camera about being blind and about the people and things that matter to him. That's close to how Mike's own [Kev upload on Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/1157337251?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) describes it. Brian Welk, an IndieWire reporter who sat on the Reply jury, wrote that it's about a young blind man's love of football, presented as an unscripted documentary even though everything in it is generated ([his juror's write-up for IndieWire](https://www.indiewire.com/features/commentary/what-i-learned-watching-6-hours-gen-ai-short-films-reply-ai-1235206110/?ref=thedaringcreatives.com)). Kev — written and directed by Mike Bennion, on YouTube It went on to be one of ten finalists at the [Reply AI Film Festival](https://www.reply.com/en/newsroom/news/ten-finalists-announced-for-the-reply-ai-film-festival-the-international-competition-bringing-together-cinema-and-artificial-intelligence?ref=thedaringcreatives.com), which screened in Venice in September alongside the Venice Film Festival. It also won the Doc/Mockumentary category at the [MetaMorph Award](https://www.metamorph-award.com/post/i-felt-as-though-i-got-to-know-kev-as-i-would-a-real-person-mike-bennion-on-ai-character-and-w?ref=thedaringcreatives.com). The Vimeo thumbnail for Kev is now a wall of roughly forty festival laurels, with wins at Doc.Boston and the Rome AI Festival among them. ## Kev started as a face There was no script. Mike's description of how Kev began, from his MetaMorph Q&A: *"This one started as creating interesting faces in Midjourney that weren't generic. Then it sat on my computer for ages as I didn't know what to do with it."* When he came back to it, *"it felt as though Kev had something to say so I let him talk in Veo3, initially about being blind, then as I made more clips, about other things."* One clip led to the next until a story showed up. *"It told me when it was done."* He describes the same start in a longer conversation with Curt Doty on the [CLOWD Masters podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0T7iV-uh%5Fk&ref=thedaringcreatives.com). *"I didn't have a script or an end goal. I had a starting bunch of images, maybe three or four images that I liked that I'd made."* He animates those, makes more images in the same mood, and lets the story grow out of what he has. He compares directing that way to working with actors. *"I have ultimate control but I like to be surprised, much like working with actors. I am always alert to the 'magic moment', a look, a phrasing."* And about Kev specifically: *"I thunk him up, but ai breathed life into him."* ## He'd cast a talking head before Kev has a predecessor. In 2025 Mike made [his short film Like](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R3kLRLRNEs&ref=thedaringcreatives.com), two minutes of a man named Andy listing what he likes and doesn't. It won Best AI Character at LAAIMPA, the Los Angeles AI film awards. Like — a short film by Mike Bennion, on YouTube He treated Andy like a casting job. In his [LAAIMPA winner's interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF3ERnk7ifo&ref=thedaringcreatives.com) he said he generated several candidates in Midjourney: *"I had a casting session"* and *"I picked Andy because he had a face that I thought, yeah, I will be entertained by this guy."* Then he moved Andy with Veo 3, and the part that surprised him was the voice. *"I didn't have to do anything with the voice. It was always the same voice."* He said Veo 3 is strongest on a tight shot of a person talking to camera, so he builds around that shot. Most of Andy's likes and dislikes are Mike's own, down to modern cars (against) and the smell of matches (for). He flipped one on purpose: Andy can't stand Picasso-style paintings with wonky eyes, which Mike actually likes, because he thought it was funnier that way. ## Then a whole cast in documentary form The next step was [a short called models](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwZZHIjFYmQ&ref=thedaringcreatives.com), a cast of fashion models with animal features talking about the job: the low pay for runway shows, the sample sizes, the agents. It won Best Concept at LAAIMPA in February 2026. models — a short film by Mike Bennion, on YouTube He told the same festival, in [a second LAAIMPA interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38AIh14-oq4&ref=thedaringcreatives.com), that he started with a big batch of Midjourney characters, cut it to about a dozen, and gave each one short Veo 3 clips of them talking. The questions came from thinking like a documentary maker: *"this is what a documentarian would do they would ask them these kind of questions."* The characters who had better things to say got more screen time. He left some of the audio rough on purpose. *"If you shoot a real documentary the sound quality is often the weakest element of it."* His summary of his own method: *"I don't really know what a workflow is. I just kind of make it up as I go along."* ## Small things, slow cuts Mike is blunt about what he's chasing. *"I'm a frustrated film director and I'm desperately trying to recreate reality that I would get through a camera lens,"* he told Curt Doty. If a generation looks a bit off to him, he throws it out. He isn't interested in the moon-and-back stuff. He'd rather have *"the spider's web gently blowing in the wind,"* the kind of small natural detail he says AI is already good at. memento mori — a short film by Mike Bennion, on YouTube memento mori, above, is the clearest example: a man remembering his little sister through glimpses of childhood, with a whispered voiceover. He later made Carpe Diem as her reply from the other side, set to Peter Gabriel's Wall of Breath, and it's featured on [the 50:50 creators site](https://www.5050.dev/creators/mike-bennion?ref=thedaringcreatives.com) alongside other films made to Gabriel's songs. His prompts are short. *"All my prompts are super simple, as minimalist as they can possibly be."* He writes them himself rather than having a chatbot draft them, because he finds those too wordy. *"You only need a sentence or two to get a prompt. It's not War and Peace."* He uses that freedom in the edit, too. Some shots won't cut against each other, so he generates new ones to bridge them. *"Sometimes I've invented characters or cutaway moments so I can get that cut, a clean cut."* On a film shoot you lived with what you got. *"It would cost a fortune to send a crew out for another day."* And he makes them slow on purpose, the opposite of the three-second hook. *"If you've made it to the first minutes where nothing's happened, then I've done my job properly."* ## What in Kev is his Kev is invented, but Mike told MetaMorph which parts came from him: *"I am a Manchester United supporter, and I have suffered for 20 years now. So this was revenge on City. Plus I'm from the North West, and we all speak like this. And I miss my dad too."* The money side is as plain as the rest. *"I tell all my stories in AI as I haven't got the budget to shoot them for real."* He says AI made him *"a much better director"* because he writes his own scripts now and isn't stuck selling something in 30 seconds. Tools named for Kev - **Midjourney** — the faces Kev started from (Mike, MetaMorph Q&A) - **Veo 3** — Kev talking to camera (Mike, MetaMorph Q&A) - **Nano Banana**, **Kling** and **ElevenLabs** — listed for Kev in the Reply AI Film Festival finalist announcement ## Into the AI festivals Once Kev had made the rounds of traditional festivals, Mike moved it into AI ones. *"Now I've proved that point, it's time to get into ai festivals,"* he told MetaMorph. *"Kev is ready to come out of the shadows."* At Reply it shared a finalist slate with [Robert Gaudette's A Face Only a Mother Could Love](https://www.thedaringcreatives.com/creator-stories/robert-gaudette-face-only-a-mother-could-love/), among others. Ahead of the Venice screening, he told Semafor he'd been asked to use AI on a Hollywood film in production that was short on money. *"They wanted to see if AI could help fill that gap at a cheaper price,"* he said, and wouldn't name the film ([Semafor's report from Venice](https://www.semafor.com/article/09/04/2026/filmmakers-tout-ais-use-in-hollywood-at-the-other-film-festival-in-venice?ref=thedaringcreatives.com)). He says he can make a short film a week now, and both his channels show it. The newest upload on Vimeo, On Chapel Slope, went up on October 2.