I made a video out of an empty day.
That wasn’t the plan.
The day had that peculiar quality some days have where nothing is actually wrong, but nothing seems to matter much either. I wasn’t particularly sad. I just couldn’t find the handle.
No video idea. No great revelation. No burning creative obsession waiting to be unleashed.
Then I heard from someone I care about.
And suddenly the day changed.
Flowers.
I don’t know why my brain went there. It just did.
So I followed it.
2/9
The strange thing about making videos with AI is that sometimes the idea arrives before you understand the idea.
This was one of those times.
I knew I wanted flowers. Not a particular flower. Not a garden. Not a story about flowers.
Just flowers.
And I knew I wanted the flowers to be almost absurdly beautiful.
So I started generating them.
And somehow, almost immediately, I got a whole world of pink.
Apparently my subconscious has a color palette.
3/9
Step 1: I stopped trying to explain the flowers
My first instinct was to give them a meaning.
That’s what humans do.
Flowers must symbolize something. Rebirth. Love. Mortality. Hope. Loss. The passage of time. Probably childhood trauma if you dig far enough.
I decided not to dig.
The flowers could simply be flowers.
That became important because I wanted the narration to be about something else entirely.
The visual says one thing.
The voice says another.
And somewhere between them, the viewer gets to make the connection.
4/9
Step 2: I gave the film a woman’s voice
I wanted a woman’s voice for the heart of the piece.
Not a commercial voice.
Not a meditation-app voice.
Not somebody who sounds like she’s about to tell me that I can manifest seven figures while I sleep.
I wanted warmth.
Someone who sounded as though she had lived enough to understand difficult days without needing to explain them.
The narration became a quiet conversation about being unfinished, tired, uncertain, and occasionally surprised by something that makes the world feel possible again.
The key line for me was:
“You don’t have to earn it.
You only have to notice.”
5/9
Step 3: I added a second voice
There was still room in the video, and I realized I didn’t want to fill it with more flowers and more narration.
So I added a male voice at the beginning.
He talks about having one of those empty days.
Nothing particularly wrong.
Nothing particularly right.
Then something changes.
The woman’s voice carries the middle of the film.
And eventually the male voice returns.
Not to explain what happened.
Just to acknowledge that something did.
Lab note:
I like the idea that the two voices never have to identify themselves.
They don’t have to be characters.
They can simply be two human beings occupying the same little dream.
6/9
Step 4: I let the music stay small
This was one of those projects where the easiest mistake would have been too much music.
I wanted the flowers and voices to have room to breathe.
So the musical bed is sparse:
- Felt piano
- Soft ambient pad
- Very subtle cello texture
- Around 64 BPM
- No drums
- No percussion
- No big cinematic swell
I even liked the idea of beginning with almost no music at all.
Then, very quietly, the piano appears.
Not because something enormous has happened.
Just because something has begun to open.
7/9
Step 5: I let the happy accident stay
The flowers were all pink.
I could have gone back and deliberately introduced other colors.
I didn’t.
Sometimes the machine makes a decision for you, and fighting it only makes the work worse.
So I kept the pink.
Pale pink.
Rose.
Magenta.
Soft almost-white pink.
Pink everywhere.
Lab note:
There is a particular pleasure in discovering that the AI has accidentally made a stronger artistic decision than the human who started the project.
My job isn’t always to tell the machine what to do.
Sometimes my job is to notice what it has already done.
8/9
The tools
- Midjourney / AI image generation for the flower imagery
- ElevenLabs for the female and male narration
- Gooel Flow Music – AI music generation for the sparse instrumental bed
- Kdenlive for editing, timing, layering, and final assembly
The workflow was deliberately simple.
Generate.
Reject a lot.
Keep the strange beautiful accidents.
Generate some more.
Record the voices.
Put everything on the timeline.
Then spend an unreasonable amount of time moving things around by fractions of a second.
You know.
Art.
9/9
The real lesson
I started this project because I had an empty day.
I finished it because something sparked.
That’s probably the part of AI creativity that interests me most.
The technology can generate flowers by the thousands.
It can generate voices.
It can generate music.
It can generate almost anything I ask for.
But it can’t decide why I suddenly need to make a video about flowers.
That part is still mine.
The tools give me an orchestra.
I still have to listen for the music.
And sometimes the best creative direction isn’t a carefully constructed concept.
Sometimes it’s just:
Flowers.
So I followed the impulse.
And apparently, for one strange little night in Palouse, that was enough.
TL;DR: I had an empty day, got sparked, made a video about flowers, accidentally made everything pink, and decided not to argue with the universe.
PS- The pink was no accident.
Steve Teare
video alchemist
TerminallyBored.Monster
Palouse, Washington USA