There are times when I make a video because I have a brilliant idea.
And then there are times when I make a video because something is rattling around inside my head and apparently the only way to shut it up is to turn it into a movie.
This one was the second kind.
I started with “Chasing Cars.”
Not the usual version.
I slowed the music down until it stopped feeling like a song and started feeling like memory.
And then I wondered what would happen if two people simply talked over it.
2/9
The idea was pretty simple.
An older man.
A woman.
Two voices.
Neither one performing.
Neither one explaining.
Just speaking the words as though they were private thoughts that had somehow escaped into the room.
I wanted space between the lines.
A lot of space.
Because when somebody is really confessing something, they don’t generally sound like they’re reading from a teleprompter.
They stop.
They breathe.
They reconsider the next word.
Sometimes they don’t say anything at all.
Lab note:
I have discovered that silence is one of the most expensive special effects in filmmaking.
It costs absolutely nothing and takes forever.
3/9
I had two versions of the instrumental.
One was closer to the original.
The other was more intimate and cinematic.
Both were in A major at 104 BPM.
That was still too fast for what I had in mind.
So I slowed them down.
I landed around 82 BPM.
And suddenly the whole emotional temperature changed.
The music became heavier.
More spacious.
More vulnerable.
It gave the voices somewhere to exist.
That was the trick.
I wasn’t trying to make the voices fit the music.
I was trying to make the music give the voices permission to breathe.
4/9
Then came the images.
I knew immediately that I didn’t want to illustrate the words literally.
That is one of my favorite traps in AI filmmaking.
You hear a lyric about longing and immediately start generating somebody standing dramatically in the rain.
Congratulations.
You have just made approximately 4.7 million other music videos.
I wanted something quieter.
More mysterious.
So I went to the bedroom.
White sheets.
Dark rooms.
Women alone.
Bare shoulders.
Hair across pillows.
Hands gripping fabric.
Bodies disappearing beneath sheets.
Morning light.
Empty beds.
Windows.
Reflections.
And enormous amounts of negative space.
There would be no men in the images.
And the women would never be interacting with one another.
They weren’t characters in a story.
They were fragments of feeling.
5/9
That distinction became important.
I wasn’t making a story about these women.
I was making a visual vocabulary for loneliness, desire, vulnerability, exhaustion, acceptance and all those other inconvenient things humans carry around without a convenient filing system.
Each woman became a variation on the same emotional condition.
The voices provided continuity.
The images provided atmosphere.
The music provided gravity.
That was enough.
The opening image is deliberately enormous.
A woman alone beneath white sheets.
An enormous dark bedroom surrounding her.
The bed almost disappears into the darkness.
She is tiny inside all that space.
And that composition returns at the end.
Only by then, hopefully, something has changed.
Not necessarily her.
Maybe us.
6/9
Getting the still images right was another exercise in patience.
AI image generators are wonderfully obedient right up until they aren’t.
You can ask for one adult woman alone in a dark bedroom and somehow the machine decides she needs a mysterious friend standing six feet behind her.
No.
Thank you.
Go away.
Try again.
I kept tightening the language.
One woman.
Alone.
No other person.
No interaction.
No text.
No logos.
No accidental narrative.
I also wanted the images to feel cinematic rather than like a collection of pretty AI photographs.
So I kept pushing toward composition.
Negative space.
Light.
Texture.
Lens feel.
Depth.
The position of the body within the frame.
The still images needed to suggest movement before I ever animated them.
7/9
This is where I think AI filmmaking gets interesting.
The still image isn’t really the finished thing anymore.
It’s the starting point.
A woman lying beneath a sheet isn’t enough.
I want to imagine what happens when the sheet moves slightly.
What happens when a curtain shifts.
What happens when her hair moves across the pillow.
What happens when the camera slowly retreats.
What happens when light changes almost imperceptibly across the room.
Those tiny movements are where the photograph becomes a scene.
And that’s where the master alchemist gets to work.
My job isn’t to make every decision.
My job is to recognize the interesting ones.
Sometimes the machine gives me something better than what I asked for.
Sometimes it gives me complete nonsense.
Both are part of the process.
8/9
The tools for this one were deliberately simple.
Creative stack:
• Music: “Chasing Cars” instrumental source, slowed for the project
• Fadr.ai Stem separation: AI stem-separation tools
• ElevenLabs Voices: two contrasting spoken voices
• Image generation: Grok Imagine
• Video construction: Kdenlive
• Editing and audio manipulation: Audacity and Kdenlive
• Human supervision: me, sitting at the computer wondering why I thought this was going to be easy
Lab note:
The biggest discovery wasn’t a particular AI tool.
It was restraint.
The slower I made the music, the less I needed to show.
The more space I left between spoken lines, the more important the images became.
And the quieter the images became, the more emotional the whole thing felt.
9/9
That is probably the real lesson I am taking away from this project.
I used to think cinematic filmmaking was largely about adding things.
More movement.
More cuts.
More effects.
More images.
More information.
I’m becoming increasingly convinced that it is often about removing things.
Let the shot sit.
Let the voice hesitate.
Let the music breathe.
Let the viewer wonder what happened before the camera arrived.
Let the image exist without explaining itself.
This is what I love about working with AI.
It gives me an enormous orchestra.
But it doesn’t tell me what song I am trying to hear.
That part is still mine.
I am the one deciding when the music should slow down.
When the woman should disappear beneath the sheets.
When the camera should stop moving.
And, perhaps most importantly, when nothing should happen at all.
Sometimes you don’t need another image.
You just need to leave the room quiet long enough for the audience to hear themselves.
TL;DR:
I slowed down “Chasing Cars,” put two voices inside the empty spaces, surrounded them with women, sheets, darkness and light, and discovered that sometimes the most powerful thing I can put into an AI film is nothing.
The machines made the pixels.
I just tried to listen.
Steve Teare
video alchemist
TerminallyBored.Monster
Palouse, Washington USA
PSYCHOANALYSIS
A private liturgy of longing. The short is less a narrative than a ritual: the bedroom as confessional booth, the body as both penitent and relic, “Chasing Cars” as the liturgy. It stages the tension between radical self-sufficiency and the ache to be witnessed.
The opening title card and the first spoken lines set the thesis: “Everything on our own. We don’t need anything or anyone.” Then the song immediately contradicts it. The entire piece lives in that contradiction.
The bed as sacred/profane space
White sheets function like vestments and like shrouds. They cover and they reveal; they are clutched, wrapped, dragged across the floor, left rumpled. The camera treats rumpled linen with the same reverence it gives a face or a collarbone. This is not casual undress. It is the visual language of someone who has just been (or wishes to be) known completely and is now alone with the residue of that knowing.
Multiple women appear—different hair, different bone structure, same posture of repose. The effect is not collage-as-variety-show; it is the suggestion that the feeling is archetypal. Any woman in this light, in this rumpled white, becomes the same confession.
Gaze and the fourth wall
Several close-ups look almost directly into the lens (eyes open after sleep, a slight smile that doesn’t quite reach the mouth, a later glance that is more guarded). These are not seductive stares. They are the look of someone who has decided, for a few seconds, to stop performing solitude and let the viewer see the performance. In psychoanalytic terms it is a controlled leak of interiority: “I know you are watching. I am allowing it because the alternative—complete isolation—is worse.”
The song’s central question (“If I just lay here, would you lie with me and just forget the world?”) is never answered by another body. The answer is the camera itself. The viewer is conscripted into the role of the absent other.
Light as both grace and exposure
Harsh slashes of sunlight across faces, shoulders, and bent knees; deep shadow elsewhere. The lighting does two contradictory things at once: it sanctifies the body (almost painterly, Caravaggio-adjacent) and it interrogates it. Nothing can hide. The same light that makes skin luminous also makes the empty bed at the end look like an abandoned altar.
Temporal and emotional structure
The piece moves through states rather than plot:
- Sleep / half-sleep (vulnerability without self-consciousness)
- Waking and looking (the moment self-awareness returns)
- Rising, wrapping the sheet, going to the window (the world is still out there)
- Return to the bed, sometimes smiling with eyes closed (a private peace)
- Empty bed (the confession has been made and the confessor has left)
The final overhead shots of a woman lying still, then another woman smiling faintly, then black, feel like the last words of a confession that will be repeated tomorrow morning in a different body.
What is being confessed
Not a specific sin. The confession is the condition itself: the simultaneous knowledge that one can survive entirely alone and the persistent, almost religious hunger to have that aloneness interrupted by another person’s weight, breath, and gaze. The title “CONFESSIONAL” and the credit “CREATED BY HELLBENDER” together suggest the maker is both priest and penitent—compelled to keep filming this particular sacrament of solitude and desire.
It is restrained, almost courtly in its sensuality. The erotic charge comes less from explicitness than from the prolonged attention paid to the moment after intimacy, or the moment that substitutes for it. The video does not resolve the tension it sets up. It simply holds it, beautifully, in white sheets and morning light, until the screen goes black.