I started with a sentence.
“Our bodies hormones (and we have so many) are like a symphony. It is amazing. Beautiful – eerie almost.”
That was Spark talking.
And, because I am apparently incapable of hearing an interesting sentence without immediately turning it into a video, my brain supplied the obvious question:
What if the hormones actually were a symphony?
Then another question arrived.
Who is conducting?
That was the moment the project went sideways.
Because the more I thought about it, the less the human body looked like a beautifully disciplined orchestra and the more it looked like a committee meeting in which everyone has authority, nobody has the agenda, and somebody is always demanding lunch.
So I made a TED talk about it.
A completely serious one.
Mostly.
2/9
The working title became The Hormonal Symphony.
I wanted the opening to feel genuinely beautiful.
Not comedy.
Not cartoon science.
I wanted the viewer to believe, for at least a little while, that they were watching an expensive science documentary.
So we begin with an orchestra.
A magnificent one.
Strings. Woodwinds. Brass. Percussion. A conductor under a warm spotlight.
Then we go microscopic.
Chemical messengers move through the body like tiny points of light.
The orchestra plays beautifully.
Everything appears coordinated.
And then I remove the conductor.
Not dramatically.
Just… quietly.
The musicians keep playing.
Which is where the trouble begins.
3/9
Step 1: Turn biology into people
The central creative decision was to stop trying to visualize hormones literally.
A glowing blob labeled “cortisol” is not particularly funny.
A stern corporate executive whose entire job is to look for threats?
Now we have something.
So I built the hormonal system as a corporate committee.
Cortisol became the Chief Threat Assessment Officer.
Adrenaline became Emergency Response.
Dopamine became Director of Motivation & Reward.
Oxytocin became Interpersonal Relations.
Ghrelin became Appetite & Resource Acquisition.
The prefrontal cortex became Executive Function.
And the pancreas?
The pancreas showed up with charts.
Lots of charts.
Nobody asked for the charts.
The pancreas had charts anyway.
Lab note:
This is one of those places where AI imagery works better when I stop asking it to illustrate an idea and start giving it something concrete to photograph.
A person in a suit is something Midjourney understands.
A metaphorical representation of hormonal regulation is something I apparently have to negotiate with it about.
4/9
Step 2: Make the committee serious
The comedy depends on everybody taking this completely seriously.
That was important.
I did not want Saturday-morning-cartoon hormones running around screaming.
I wanted corporate America.
Polished conference room.
Expensive suits.
Glass walls.
Presentation screens.
Water glasses.
Folders.
Everyone looking like they had spent the morning preparing for a strategic planning meeting.
Then we let the biology take over.
Cortisol sees a possible threat.
Adrenaline declares an emergency.
Dopamine launches a marketing campaign.
Oxytocin tries to calm everyone down.
Ghrelin wants food.
The prefrontal cortex is trying to maintain executive function while everybody else has apparently lost the agenda.
And nobody is actually in charge.
That became the recurring joke.
The human body is an astonishingly sophisticated system.
It is also, apparently, a committee.
Lab note:
The funniest visual gag turned out to be the empty chair.
The committee room has a chair at the head of the table.
It is empty.
There is no central boss.
There is no little CEO sitting there with a clipboard saying, “All right, everybody, let’s regulate blood glucose.”
There are just signals.
Lots and lots of signals.
5/9
Step 3: Give the committee somewhere to go
Once I had the boardroom, I needed a way to make the story physical.
So I brought back the orchestra.
This time, things are starting to go wrong.
One violinist looks uncertain.
Another musician glances sideways.
The conductor begins to worry.
Different sections start playing different rhythms.
The committee is becoming active.
Then things escalate.
Cortisol starts looking for threats.
Adrenaline responds to the threats.
Dopamine insists everything is going wonderfully.
Oxytocin tries to restore peace.
Ghrelin becomes increasingly focused on the fact that nobody has eaten.
And the prefrontal cortex is beginning to look like a man who has just discovered that his job description contains the phrase “manage all of this.”
The orchestra becomes the biological equivalent of a workplace emergency.
Except nobody gets to go home.
Because it is their body.
6/9
Step 4: Let the sandwich save civilization
There is a point in every serious scientific investigation where the truth finally reveals itself.
In this case, the truth was lunch.
Ghrelin has had enough.
There is an empty plate.
There is an abandoned lunch container.
There is a room full of executives discussing increasingly complicated biological problems.
And then the solution appears.
A sandwich.
I gave the sandwich a heroic entrance.
Golden spotlight.
Majestic composition.
The kind of lighting normally reserved for the return of a king.
It is, after all, a sandwich.
The orchestra eventually comes back into harmony.
The conductor regains control.
The committee quiets down.
And the whole biological system returns to something resembling equilibrium.
Which brings us back to Spark’s original observation.
The hormones really are like a symphony.
Beautiful.
Intricate.
Extraordinarily coordinated.
And just a little eerie when you stop and think about what is actually happening inside you every second.
7/9
The production stack
This one became a pretty pure AI production.
Midjourney handled the still imagery.
I built the characters as recurring visual anchors rather than asking the image model to understand abstract symbolism.
Grok handled the image-to-video movement.
ElevenLabs handled the narration.
Google Flow Music provided the orchestral score.
Kdenlive handled the final assembly.
Audacity handled some of the audio cleanup and preparation.
And then there was me.
The video alchemist.
My job was mostly to stand in the middle of all these systems and keep saying:
“No. That’s not quite it.”
Then:
“Try this.”
Then:
“Oh… that’s actually better.”
That last part matters.
Because some of the best moments were not things I designed perfectly in advance.
They emerged from the process.
That is one of the things I like most about working this way.
The AI is not simply executing a finished idea.
It is participating in the discovery of the idea.
8/9
The real lesson
The obvious lesson is that AI can make funny pictures.
That is true, but it is not particularly interesting.
The more interesting lesson for me was how much the emotional tone of the piece depended on refusing to make the comedy too obvious.
If everything had been silly from the first frame, the joke would have been shallow.
Instead, I started with wonder.
A real orchestra.
Beautiful music.
Microscopic biological imagery.
The extraordinary complexity of the human body.
Then I slowly introduced the absurdity.
That contrast is what makes the joke work.
And it also brings me back to the original sentence.
“Our bodies hormones… are like a symphony.”
Yes.
They are.
The joke is not that the body is badly designed.
The joke is that something unimaginably complicated is happening inside us while we go about our ordinary day completely unaware of most of it.
We eat lunch.
We get nervous.
We fall in love.
We get angry.
We calm down.
We become hungry.
We suddenly want something.
We change our minds.
And underneath all of that, an enormous biochemical orchestra is playing continuously.
No audience.
No intermission.
And apparently no conductor.
9/9
TL;DR:
I took one beautiful observation about hormones and turned it into a fake TED talk about a dysfunctional corporate committee living inside a symphony orchestra.
Then I added a sandwich.
That is pretty much how video alchemy works around here.
I start with a thought.
I give it to the machines.
They give me something I did not quite expect.
I argue with it.
I follow the happy accidents.
Eventually, somewhere between the original idea and the ridiculous thing on the screen, I discover what I was actually trying to say.
And maybe that is the part of AI creativity I enjoy most.
I am not replacing the imagination with a machine.
I am putting another strange instrument into the orchestra.
Then I see what happens when we play.
Steve Teare
video alchemist
TerminallyBored.Monster
Palouse, Washington USA