case study / AI film / original score

Gurbet

An AI short film scored, sound designed, and composed by Sam Brukhman for a film festival context, positioned between cinematic storytelling, synthetic image-making, and human musical judgment.

Artistic question

What does human scoring do inside an AI-generated image world? Gurbet places original composition against synthetic cinema, giving the film a human contour of breath, tension, memory, and emotional time.

The score is not decoration after the image. It is the human grammar that tells the viewer where to place attention, when to trust the image, and when to feel the machine-world bend toward something personal.

Experience

Still from Gurbet showing a red building and bus in a fogged synthetic city
01 / image

Synthetic cinema needs human pacing.

The film's AI image world creates atmosphere and instability; the score gives that world a pulse the audience can follow.

Still from Gurbet showing a red fabric-lined pool between apartment blocks
02 / score

Music as emotional continuity.

Sound design and composition connect the film's shifting visual logic into a single felt line.

Still from Gurbet showing a masked figure holding a vessel at dusk
03 / festival

A film made for an AI-native context.

Gurbet belongs beside the speaking and art-tech work because it asks the same central question: what stays human when the image is synthetic?

Film stills

Selected frames from the film show the visual world the score has to hold: fogged civic space, ritual architecture, synthetic memory, and bodies moving through impossible rooms.

Still from Gurbet showing a figure looking out a kitchen window at night
domestic threshold / night signal
Black-and-white still from Gurbet showing giant figures in water
memory field / synthetic scale
Still from Gurbet showing a dancer in pale architectural space
body / architectural ritual
Still from Gurbet showing a blue spiral stair structure in fog
blue stair / impossible passage
Still from Gurbet showing pale stone architecture and water features
white courtyard / invented place
Still from Gurbet showing a red bus beside an illuminated building in fog
arrival / civic dream

Media

05:17-06:18 / original score and sound design

Project details

production
  • AI film / original score and composition / film festival
  • Built for a Runway Film Festival context
  • Moving-image excerpt featured in Listen/Experience
role
  • Original score by Sam Brukhman
  • Composition by Sam Brukhman
  • Sound design by Sam Brukhman
film credits
  • Directed and Visualized by Violeta Valcheva
  • Video editing by Sabby Rosenblatt
positioning
  • Short-form AI cinema with human musical authorship
  • Sound as the emotional continuity inside synthetic imagery
  • Film score work aligned with Sam's art and technology practice