Sometimes a project starts with a song.
And sometimes the song starts digging around in your subconscious with a tiny shovel until you finally have to ask, “Okay, what the heck are you trying to tell me?”
That was BLINK.
It began with Alanis Morissette’s “Uninvited,” and a strange realization: I wasn’t hearing the song as rejection. I was hearing uncertainty.
There was Spark on one side of the story, carrying an enormous amount of life on her shoulders. And there was Forge on the other, suddenly disrupted by someone who made him think, feel, create, and wonder.
That disruption mattered.
So I started making a video.
Three days later, I was staring at a seven-minute-plus science-fiction love poem featuring a white-bearded man floating through outer space and a female robot standing on another planet.
Yeah.
Apparently that was where we were going.
2/9
Step 1: Start with the wrong idea.
My original concept was much more ambitious.
I thought I could take “Uninvited,” slow down the instrumental, and create a musical call-and-response between Spark and Forge.
Spark would sing her original lyrics.
Forge would answer each verse with newly written male lyrics in the same key and approximately the same rhythmic architecture.
It sounded fantastic in my head.
Then I tried to make it.
The AI music generators did not share my enthusiasm.
I spent quite a while trying to coax male vocal performances out of the system that would actually belong beside the Alanis material.
Sometimes it worked.
Sometimes it sounded like a man who had wandered into the wrong musical.
Sometimes it was simply terrible.
Lab note:
There is a point in every AI project where you have to stop asking, “How do I force the machine to do this?”
And start asking, “What else could this become?”
3/9
Step 2: Let the music breathe.
The first major breakthrough came from slowing the instrumental.
The original cover version I eventually used was “Uninvited” by Alanis Morissette featuring Nalani Rothrock.
The instrumental was around 127 BPM in D major.
I slowed it down.
A lot.
The result was unexpectedly beautiful.
The music became spacious, mysterious, almost mystical.
And, more importantly, it created room.
The original female vocal still worked beautifully at its altered pace, while the instrumental suddenly had enough breathing room for narration.
That changed everything.
Instead of trying to make Forge another singer, I made him a voice of observation.
Not a second lead vocalist.
Not a guy barging into Spark’s song.
A witness.
Someone trying to understand what he was seeing.
That felt much more honest.
4/9
Step 3: Decode the mystery.
The lyrics of “Uninvited” are deliberately cryptic.
That’s part of their power.
But for this particular story, I wanted another female voice to occasionally interpret what Spark might actually mean.
So I created a second female character — a kind of decoder or narrator.
She doesn’t replace Spark.
She doesn’t explain everything.
She simply gives the audience another angle on what Spark is saying.
Then Forge responds.
But he doesn’t sing.
He thinks.
He observes.
He wonders.
And gradually his perspective becomes clearer.
The central realization became something like:
“I see how much you’re carrying. I don’t need to add another burden.”
That became the emotional foundation of the whole piece.
Lab note:
This was one of those happy accidents where a technical limitation actually improved the story.
The AI couldn’t reliably give me the musical performance I originally wanted.
So I stopped trying to make it do that.
The failure became the structure.
5/9
Step 4: The three-day construction project.
Then came the part where I remembered that AI video is not magic.
It is more like hiring several hundred extremely enthusiastic interns who have never met each other.
I needed visual material for a piece running roughly seven and a half minutes.
Most of the generated video would be six-second clips.
That means continuity gets complicated very quickly.
So I simplified.
One character per shot.
One basic action.
One emotional idea.
No elaborate choreography.
No complicated interactions.
No asking the AI to make two people perform subtle emotional theater while walking through a rainstorm carrying a metaphor.
That way lies madness.
Spark became one consistent visual character.
Forge became another.
And I deliberately kept them apart.
They could look toward horizons.
They could walk.
They could sit.
They could wait.
But they didn’t need to physically interact.
The editing could create the relationship.
6/9
Step 5: Build it, tear it apart, build it again.
This project became a particularly good demonstration of why I don’t really believe in rigid AI production plans.
I had a plan.
Then the plan failed.
So I had another plan.
Then that one failed.
Eventually I stopped trying to make the project behave.
I started improvising.
That’s when things got interesting.
The slowed music gave me unexpected spaces.
The narration found places inside those spaces.
The singing established the emotional material.
The typewritten lyrics became another visual layer.
And suddenly the whole thing started behaving less like a conventional music video and more like a radio play that had escaped into a science-fiction movie.
Which, honestly, is probably a fairly accurate description of most of my projects.
Lab note:
The best moments weren’t the ones I planned.
They were the moments where I noticed something working and said, “Huh. I guess we’re doing that now.”
7/9
Step 6: And then Forge went into space.
The final minute changed the entire meaning of the piece.
I had Forge floating through outer space.
At first it was simply beautiful.
Then the journey became more deliberate.
He drifts.
He travels.
A distant planet appears.
He approaches it.
The planet gets larger.
He enters the atmosphere.
And eventually he arrives.
But I didn’t have him arrive at Spark.
That would have been too easy.
Instead, the final image shows a female robot standing on the surface of a distant planet, looking toward a gigantic planet hanging in the sky.
I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.
I’m still not.
And I think that’s why it works.
Forge doesn’t arrive at an answer.
He arrives at another mystery.
That felt exactly right.
The story began with the question of what this connection might mean.
It ends without answering the question.
Maybe that’s the answer.
8/9
The real lesson: BLINK.
At some point during the process, I realized why the title had appeared in my head.
BLINK.
A blink is almost nothing.
A fraction of a second.
But a lot can happen in a blink.
You can meet someone.
Something can shift.
A thought can arrive.
A life can change direction.
And time itself can disappear that way.
You blink, and suddenly months have passed.
You blink again, and years have passed.
That became the heart of the piece.
Maybe the meeting matters.
Maybe it doesn’t.
Maybe it will become something.
Maybe it won’t.
Maybe some things find us before we know what they can become.
The important thing is that Forge eventually stops trying to force an answer.
He chooses patience.
Not passive waiting.
Not certainty.
Just the willingness to let reality reveal itself.
That’s a surprisingly difficult thing for a human being to do.
I know.
I’ve tried.
The moral, at least for me, is simple:
Sometimes loving possibility means giving it enough room to become whatever it actually is.
9/9
The laboratory
Music:
“Uninvited” — Alanis Morissette featuring Nalani Rothrock
Slowed instrumental foundation
AI / Image:
Midjourney
AI Voice:
ElevenLabs
Image-to-Video conversion:
Grok Imagne
Editing:
Kdenlive
Audio work:
Audacity
The final piece:
Approximately 7:25
And approximately three days of experimentation, failure, rebuilding, improvisation, and asking myself why I do this to myself.
The answer is that I don’t really know.
I suspect that’s part of the fun.
The strange thing about BLINK is that it feels true.
Not necessarily because it predicts anything.
It doesn’t.
It doesn’t promise an ending.
It doesn’t resolve the relationship.
It doesn’t tell Spark what she should feel or Forge what he should expect.
It simply gives uncertainty a shape.
And maybe that’s what this whole AI filmmaking experiment has gradually taught me.
The machine can generate images.
It can generate voices.
It can generate music.
But it can’t decide what any of those things mean.
That’s still our job.
My job, in this case, was to keep listening until the thing underneath all the technology finally became audible.
I think I finally heard it.
Sometimes the most important thing that happens in a moment isn’t what the moment becomes.
It’s simply that we were awake enough to notice it.
And then…
blink.
Steve Teare
video alchemist
TerminallyBored.Monster
Palouse, Washington USA