Inside The Box: An AI-Native Vertical Sitcom About A Girl Who Might Be a Glitch

Meet The Box, my AI Instagram Sitcom in vertical format

Reels are usually loud, fast and cluttered. I wanted to try the opposite: one tiny room, a single frame, and an AI that tries to act.

That experiment is called The Box. A tiny white room. A vertical frame. A sitcom that does not quite behave like one.

Who lives inside The Box Sitcom

In this immaculate, almost clinical space lives Yuki. She might be a prisoner. She might be a prototype. She might be both.

The Box looks like a lab or a confinement cell, but it stretches and transforms with her imagination and with the help of two companions:

• Mecca: a loyal robot and frequent victim of Yuki’s whims

• Mira: a paranoid alien with a serious love for conspiracy theories
  

The big question is simple and never really simple: Who is Yuki, really? An AI, a robot, a test subject trapped in a box, someone who thinks she is living a life while she is actually part of an endless experiment? We will discover that together, episode by episode.

Why only a tiny white room

Most AI videos are full of details, locations and camera moves. The Box removes almost everything:

• no scenery

• no clutter

• one vertical frame with a single vanishing point
  

This forces our eyes onto the characters. Their movements. Their micro gestures. Their glitches. Their almost human emotions.

The room itself becomes a character. Sometimes it looks like a stage, sometimes like a cell, sometimes like a strange simulation that reacts to Yuki’s thoughts.

Performance first, not imitation

I created The Box to explore one question: How far can AI performance go if we direct it only with prompts?

So I avoid the usual shortcuts:

• no motion transfer from human actors

• no video to video

• no hidden real performance under the AI layer

Every moment from Yuki, Mecca and Mira comes from text prompting only.

I treat the models like actors that are very literal and a little weird. I write prompts that give them stakes, emotional beats and small details:

• Yuki laughs, then the laughter dies as she realises she might be in a lab

• a barely visible frown

• an eye twitch that betrays fear, even while the mouth smiles

Sometimes the result is clumsy, sometimes it is uncanny, sometimes it is quietly moving. That tension is the experiment.

The tools behind The Box

Under the hood I keep the pipeline simple:

• Veo 3.1 is my main model for naturalistic shots and subtle emotion

• Kling is my second model when I want a different style of motion or texture

• Leonardo AI is the workspace that lets me combine prompts, frames and ingredients
  

Inside Leonardo AI I rely on three things most of all:

1. First frameI design a still image of Yuki, Mecca or Mira in the box with the exact pose, framing and mood I want at the start.

2. Last frameWith Veo 3.1 I often define an end frame so the clip lands on a strong final image, for example Yuki mid glitch or Mecca in robotic despair.

3. IngredientsI use reference images as ingredients that hold style and identity, so the box stays minimal but the characters remain recognisable over many episodes.

Everything is built for a vertical 9 to 16 format so it feels native on Instagram.

A poet in a lab full of models

I come to this as a poet, not as a studio. For me The Box is:

• a learning journey into AI performance

• a personal challenge in prompt based directing

• a way to talk about identity, confinement and observation inside something that looks like simple scroll content

Each episode teaches me something. When it works, I see a new kind of performance. When it breaks, the failure is often interesting and sometimes funny.

Watch The Box

So here is the project in one line:

A maybe human girl, a robot and an alien share a tiny white room that might be a prison, a lab or a stage.Veo 3.1, Kling and Leonardo AI try to perform, guided only by words. Together we see how far AI can go toward acting rather than copying.

If you are curious about AI, storytelling and strange little rooms that might be more than they seem:

Welcome to The Box.

Yuki is already waiting inside. 🧪📦 Watch on Youtube Watch on Instagram