One day, Shafeer Shamsudheen paused at a manhole – an ordinary circle of steel set into a tired road – and felt a story open. Five days later, in scattered hours between work and life, that fleeting spark had become The Light We Follow, a short film made entirely with AI that still feels made by hand.
The premise began playfully: a South Asian family came into view – on a flight, back home, a busy kitchen, a gift to a child, – all the small choreographies of care that makes a home.
What holds the film together isn’t plot so much as presence. Light pools and slips across surfaces, warm one moment, dense the next. It seems to think. It seems to remember.
There’s a quiet, modern astonishment tucked into this craft. A year ago, Shafeer reminds us, AI struggled with fingers—the simplest human tool. In this film, a bracelet is tied, gently, convincingly. The dexterity is a real threshold. When hands can hold, almost everything else – mood, gesture, the pause between two people -begins to feel possible.
That manhole returns as a portal. The squirrel descends and finds a different world, and the film tilts toward magical realism without forcing the point.
And wonder arrives the way kindness does: as a small, plausibly impossible thing that restores balance. The message is short and clean: kindness matters. It is the light we follow through the blind spots of a tough, churning world.
And yet, for all the newness of the tools, The Light We Follow insists on an old truth. AI can render; a human must see. The choices – the colour, the silence, the cuts — are human work.
Shafeer’s experience designing digital campaigns, lifting static digital forms into motion, gives him the patience to guide a machine toward emotion, and the restraint to stop when the image is enough.
The film also gestures at a wider promise: embracing technology doesn’t make us less human. It can sharpen the outline of what we already feel.
As a line often attributed to Stanley Kubrick has it: “If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.” That spirit fits.
Here, imagination meets an accessible toolset, and a budgetless thought arrives as a task you can sit with for a few minutes and carry for a few days.
The Light We Follow is modest – no explosions, no declarations. It trusts brevity. A squirrel finds a chain. A family ties a bracelet. Light moves.
In those unassuming gestures, the film offers a gentle claim: the future of storytelling will be built by whatever can be imagined – and held – by a human hand. Shafeer found a story in a manhole and, with no budget and a lot of care, let it lead him. The light does the rest.
Watch the short here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdFcTAtZx58
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