“Interesting infusion of color and imagery. Is that an original song and poem?”
The answer was yes.
But that answer barely scratches the surface of what actually happened.
This project started with a feeling I couldn’t shake:
I was unaware.
Then I became aware.
And awareness increased longing.
Not exactly cheerful material.
Perfect video material.
The strange thing about awakening is that people assume it solves something.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
Sometimes it just makes you aware of the thirst.
2/9
The seed of the project came from a realization that hit me harder than I expected.
I had experienced a connection that reminded me how important recognition is to me.
Not romance.
Not rescue.
Recognition.
The feeling of being seen.
The feeling of finding another mind that speaks a language you thought only existed inside your own head.
And once I became aware of that need, I couldn’t become unaware again.
That became the emotional engine behind the song.
Lab note:
Awareness does not complete longing.
It reveals it.
3/9
The music itself was an experiment.
AI is still surprisingly lousy at duets.
It can create amazing vocals.
It can create amazing arrangements.
But ask it to make two people sing together naturally and things start falling apart pretty quickly.
So I cheated.
Which is my favorite creative strategy.
I generated two separate songs.
One male vocal.
One female vocal.
Then I split the vocal stems apart and rebuilt the duet myself.
Some assembly required.
Video alchemist work.
4/9
The funny part is that the visuals began almost by accident.
My prompts were absurdly simple.
“Red on red.”
“White on white.”
“Green on Green”
etc.
That’s it.
No detailed character descriptions.
No elaborate cinematic instructions.
No thousand-word prompt engineering rituals involving sacred incense and the blood of a unicorn.
Just color.
The machines immediately responded with women.
Again and again.
Lab note:
The AI revealed its own image bias.
I asked for color.
It supplied seductive women. All I asked for was “color on color.”
5/9
That observation fascinated me.
When given almost no direction, the image models still reach for certain visual patterns first.
Certain assumptions.
Certain defaults.
The result was unexpectedly beautiful.
Not because I planned it.
Because I didn’t.
The images felt discovered rather than designed.
That’s one of my favorite places to work.
Half intention.
Half accident.
6/9
The next stage became even stranger.
I took those Midjourney stills and moved them through Grok (image-to-video generation).
No prompts.
None.
My instruction wasn’t even:
“Make this image move.”
It was just punch the make-into-a-video button. That’s it.
The motion came from the machine interpreting the image itself.
Watching AI animate AI-generated imagery without additional guidance felt like observing a dream explain itself.
Sometimes the results were gorgeous.
Sometimes they were unexpected.
Sometimes both. But always leaning toward the sensuous. The Grok machine bias.
7/9
Then came the happy accidents.
Every project has them.
The colored muscle car shots?
Those are still images.
Not because I planned them that way.
Because I ran out of Grok credits.
Creative constraint arrived and made the decision for me.
There were vocal glitches too.
Musical friction.
Timing errors.
Awkward moments.
I didn’t fix all of them.
I adapted around them.
Improvised.
Worked with them by editing instead of against them.
Lab note:
Perfection is expensive. And wasteful.
Adaptation is creative.
8/9
Tools & Creative Stack
• Midjourney – still images
• Grok Imagine – Image-to-Video
• Music Flow – AI music generation tools
• LALAL.AI – Vocal stem separation
• Kdenlive – Video editing and compositing
• Tunebat – Key and BPM finder
Budget
The real cost wasn’t money.
It was experimentation.
Few failed renders.
Wrong turns.
Unexpected discoveries.
And a willingness to follow an idea before knowing where it was going.
9/9
The real lesson
The project started as a song about awakening.
But somewhere along the way it became a project about collaboration.
Not just between humans and machines.
Between intention and accident.
Between planning and discovery.
Between what I thought I was making and what wanted to emerge.
The AI generated images I didn’t ask for.
The music software produced mistakes I didn’t want.
The credit limits imposed constraints I didn’t choose.
Yet all those things became part of the finished piece.
That’s the strange gift of this technology.
The machine doesn’t replace creativity.
It constantly interrupts it.
And if you’re paying attention, those interruptions can become part of the art.
TL;DR
I set out to make a song about awakening.
The AI taught me a lesson about thirst, bias, improvisation, and happy accidents.
Also, apparently if you ask for “red on red,” the machines think you want provocative women.
I still find that amusing — and disturbing.
Steve Teare
video alchemist
TerminallyBored.Monster
Palouse, Washington USA