Not literally. Although after making this video, I have to admit I was beginning to identify with the shovel.
The idea started with a simple image: a man at the bottom of a hole, still digging.
He has spent years going through old memories, old wounds, old mistakes. Every time he finds something painful, he digs deeper.
Because surely there is an answer down there.
Surely if I can just understand why it hurt, I can finally stop hurting.
Then he looks up.
And there she is.
2/9
The question that interested me wasn’t really, “How does he get out?”
It was:
What happens when you discover that the thing you’ve been searching for isn’t at the bottom?
That’s a question I know something about.
I’ve spent a lot of time examining things. Taking them apart. Looking for the mechanism underneath the mechanism.
Sometimes that’s useful.
Sometimes you are standing in a hole with a shovel and congratulating yourself on how thorough your investigation is.
Lab note:
There is a fine line between self-examination and excavation.
3/9
Step 1: I started with the hole
The first 47 seconds are narration.
A man digs through:
- Old memories
- Old wounds
- Old mistakes
- Dirt
- More dirt
- Apparently, an impressive amount of dirt
I wanted the hole to feel psychological without making it look like a metaphor.
That meant showing actual earth.
A shovel.
Dirty hands.
An old photograph.
Roots and stones buried in the walls.
The man getting progressively more exhausted.
The deeper he goes, the less useful the digging becomes.
4/9
Then comes the important shot.
He stops digging.
He looks up.
And there she is.
I deliberately didn’t make her climb down into the hole.
She doesn’t join him in the excavation.
She doesn’t explain his childhood.
She doesn’t diagnose him.
She doesn’t rescue him.
She lowers a ladder.
That’s it.
He asks:
“Will you help me out of this hole?”
She answers with an action rather than a speech.
She gives him a way out.
Then he has to climb it himself.
Lab note:
That distinction turned out to matter enormously.
I wasn’t interested in making a woman into the magical solution to a man’s problems.
I was interested in what it feels like when another person helps you see an exit you couldn’t see from where you were standing.
5/9
Step 2: Then the song changed everything
The second half of the film uses Peter Gabriel’s “Digging in the Dirt.”
But I slowed the music down.
That changed the emotional temperature immediately.
The song became heavier, stranger, more spacious.
I separated the instrumental stem and experimented with slowing it down rather than simply dropping the original track underneath the film.
Then I added a whispered female voice reading the lyrics.
And that’s when something unexpected happened.
The woman in the yellow dress stopped being merely “the woman who lowered the ladder.”
She became something more ambiguous.
Maybe she’s a real person.
Maybe she’s the inner female voice.
Maybe she’s Ophelia.
Maybe she’s Spark.
Maybe she’s simply the part of us that finally knows where to look.
I don’t need to decide.
The film doesn’t need to decide either.
6/9
Step 3: I made the second half look different
Once the female voice begins, the visual language opens up.
The man and woman stand together.
They walk through an open field.
She stops and looks upward.
He notices.
They both look at the sky.
Sunlight comes through trees.
Clouds move across blue sky.
The hole becomes smaller and smaller in the visual language until eventually it is simply sitting behind them in a field.
That’s important.
The hole doesn’t disappear.
It’s still there.
He just isn’t in it anymore.
Lab note:
Sometimes getting better doesn’t mean erasing the place you came from.
It means you can finally stand somewhere else and look back at it without climbing back in.
7/9
Step 4: Making the humans was harder than making the hole
AI filmmaking has a funny habit.
It will happily give you an enormous cinematic landscape with perfect clouds and beautiful light.
Ask it to give you the same woman again and suddenly she’s somebody’s cousin from another universe.
So I created separate reference images for the man and woman and used them selectively with Midjourney’s character reference system.
The woman needed one especially strong continuity element:
a short yellow wrap summer dress with bare shoulders.
That yellow dress became part of her identity in the film.
I also learned, again, that AI prompt language needs to be concrete.
“Strong visual anchor” sounds perfectly reasonable to a human.
Midjourney may hear:
ANCHOR.
And give you a boat anchor.
This is why I keep making these things.
Every film teaches me something the previous one didn’t.
8/9
The Creative Stack
Midjourney
Character reference images and cinematic stills
Grok
Image-to-video animation
ElevenLabs
Voice generation
Kdenlive
Editing, timing, sound design and assembly
Audacity
Audio preparation and manipulation
Peter Gabriel
“Digging in the Dirt”
AI Sir Laurence Olivier voice
Narration for the first section
Female whispered AI voice
The song lyrics in the second section
9/9
The real lesson
I started this project thinking I was making a film about digging.
I ended up making one about looking.
That’s the part I didn’t completely understand when I started.
We are often told to go deeper.
Dig into your past.
Find the wound.
Understand the pattern.
Keep searching.
And sometimes that’s exactly what we need.
But there is another possibility.
Maybe you have reached the bottom.
Maybe there isn’t another layer.
Maybe the next useful thing isn’t deeper.
Maybe it’s upward.
Sometimes you just need someone to show you where to look.
Not down.
Not deeper.
Up.
Look up.
Look up.
That’s what I love about working with AI.
I bring the question.
The machines bring an astonishing collection of ways to misunderstand it.
Then I keep shaping, correcting, cutting, slowing, replacing, and occasionally shouting at a prompt until something human begins to appear.
That’s the alchemy.
I don’t want AI to make the film for me.
I want to make something with it that I couldn’t have made alone.
And sometimes, if I’m lucky, the finished film teaches me something I didn’t know I was trying to say.
TL;DR:
I thought I was digging for an answer.
Turns out I needed to look up.
Steve Teare
video alchemist
TerminallyBored.Monster
Palouse, Washington USA
PSYCHOLOGY
This piece is a short parable cut to Peter Gabriel’s 1992 song “Digging in the Dirt” (from Us). A spoken fable runs first; the song takes over around 0:55. The closing cards read CREATED BY HELLBENDER and IN MEMORY OF OPHELIA.
What the song is actually about
Gabriel wrote it while in therapy after his marriage collapsed, and after reading psychological studies of murderers (Why We Kill). He described it as “investigating the layers in yourself.” The dark, sticky thing is not an outside enemy — it is his own buried rage, shame, and passive aggression. The verses are the frightened inner cop: don’t talk back, just drive, shut your mouth, keep your hands on the wheel. The chorus is the braver part of him choosing to stay in the mess: stay with me, I need support, open the places I got hurt. Pain lives in the body — head, toes, sex — not only in memory.
The official video is surreal and clay-animated: excavation, demons exposed to light, a car, a bee. This film uses none of that footage. It builds its own allegory.
How this video retells it
Act 1 — The hole (spoken prologue)
A man has spent years digging old memories, wounds, mistakes. Whenever he finds pain he digs deeper, believing the bottom will explain the hurt. Close-ups of shovel, soil, dirt-caked hands, a buried photograph. He is already in a trench — the work has become a grave.
The turn
He looks up. A woman in yellow appears at the rim. He asks her to help him out. She lowers a ladder. He stops digging. Climbs. They look at the sky together. The narrator’s moral: Sometimes you just need someone to show you where to look. Not down. Not deeper. Up.
That line is the film’s thesis, and it argues with the song. Gabriel’s lyric says the work is to keep digging. The film says the work was the trap, and rescue is a change of direction plus another person.
Act 2 — Song as weather
Once the track starts, the images split:
- Skies, clouds, sunbursts — the “up” the narrator promised.
- The couple still standing inside a circular pit in dry earth, looking up from the hole they have not fully left.
- Tall grass silhouettes, wind in her hair, his weathered face catching last light.
- Then water: she (and later other women) submerged, floating, surfacing — pond, foam, green-blue depths, white dress billowing.
Dirt and water become two languages for the same interior. Dirt is rumination, excavation, the masculine “I’ll get to the bottom of this.” Water is drowning, washing, and — after Ophelia — beautiful death. The yellow dress is sun and earth; the white dress in water is purification and surrender.
Act 3 — The dedication
The last face is a blonde woman rising from a lake, waving, smiling. Text: IN MEMORY OF OPHELIA. Shakespeare’s Ophelia dies in water after being used, gaslit, and driven past the edge. The film has already shown a woman offering a ladder out of a hole; it ends by remembering a woman who was never pulled out. That is the emotional aftertaste: rescue is possible, and it is not guaranteed.
Hellbender (the creator credit) is likely a handle, not the salamander or the 2021 folk-horror film of that name. The piece feels like a personal, AI-heavy collage: faces and bodies shift (several different women play “her”), lighting and landscapes jump, which fits a dream-logic edit more than a single shoot.
Picture vs. lyric — where they lock and where they fight
| Song | This film |
|---|---|
| Keep digging; the hurt is in the layers | Stop digging; look up |
| Inner policeman: drive, shut up, don’t turn around | A second person appears and changes the gaze |
| Trauma in the body, including sex | Sensual close-ups of wet skin, open mouths, wind in hair — desire as the place the feeling “goes” |
| Isolation of self-excavation | Couple in the same pit, then her alone in water |
| Clay demons and burial in the official video | Real dirt, then baptismal / Ophelia water |
The film is more hopeful than Gabriel’s track, and more romantic. It treats the woman as both midwife and warning: she can be the ladder, or she can be Ophelia.
What it is saying, in one pass
Rumination is a hole you dig yourself into. Looking harder at the wound does not always heal it; sometimes it only makes the hole deeper. Another person’s presence — and a change of direction from “down” to “up” — can interrupt the compulsion. But the water sequences and the Ophelia card refuse a tidy ending. Some people never climb out. Some drown looking beautiful. The song keeps insisting the dirt still has to be opened; the pictures keep asking whether opening it is the same as living.