There’s a moment in the original 3 Doors Down song Kryptonite where the singer asks:
“If I go crazy then will you still call me Superman?”
And somewhere along the way, while slowing down a fragile female vocal stem at 2am in rural Washington, I realized:
This was never a song about Superman.
It was a song about exhaustion.
About the terror of no longer being able to perform strength for the people who depend on you.
That realization hit me like a truck carrying emotional damage and old comic books.
So naturally I decided to make an AI film about it.
2/9
The weird thing is I didn’t change the lyrics at all.
Not one word.
I almost did.
At first I thought:
“Maybe I should rewrite it into something softer.”
But the deeper I listened, the more I realized the vulnerability was already there. Buried underneath early-2000s post-grunge radio production and masculine emotional armor.
The original song asks:
“Will you still call me Superman?”
But slowed down and sung by a fragile female voice?
It suddenly becomes:
“Will you still love me when I stop being strong?”
Entirely different emotional universe.
Same lyrics.
That’s the kind of accidental alchemy AI keeps enabling.
Not replacing creativity.
Reframing it.
Lab note:
I keep discovering that reinterpretation is often more emotionally powerful than invention.
3/9
The first breakthrough was tempo.
The vocal stem arrived at 103 BPM (beats per minute) in D minor.
It sounded good.
But not wounded enough.
So I slowed it to 95 BPM in Audacity.
That tiny shift changed everything:
• breaths stretched
• hesitation appeared
• consonants softened
• emotional space opened up
Suddenly the song felt less like:
“rock anthem”
and more like:
“someone trying not to fall apart in front of another human being.”
And honestly? That was the hidden song inside the song all along.
Lab note:
Tiny BPM shifts can radically alter perceived emotional honesty. AI music generation still struggles with this nuance unless directed very carefully.
4/9
Then came the visual concept.
I knew immediately I didn’t want literal Superman imagery.
No flying.
No skyscrapers.
No comic-book cosplay nonsense.
Too obvious.
Too loud.
Instead I landed on something much sadder:
A female boxer.
Not muscular.
Not triumphant.
Fragile.
She wears:
• worn boxing gloves
• a white ribbed tank top
• a faded cracked Superman logo
• a torn red cape
And the important part?
The fight is already over.
The ring is empty.
The crowd is gone.
The overhead light is still on.
She won the championship…
and looks emotionally destroyed by surviving it.
That became the entire emotional thesis of the project.
Strength as performance.
Collapse as privacy.
5/9
The AI image workflow became its own miniature psychological experiment.
I generated:
• empty boxing rings
• gloves hanging from ropes
• exhausted facial closeups
• cape textures
• bruised hands
• overhead spotlight compositions
• locker room mirrors
And then I started weaving monarch butterflies into the imagery.
That was the moment the project gained a soul.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
The monarch lifecycle became the emotional counterpoint to the boxer:
• egg
• caterpillar
• chrysalis
• butterfly
• two butterflies together
• a kaleidoscope of Monarchs at the end
Transformation inserted quietly between scenes of exhaustion.
The chrysalis stage especially hit me hard.
Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar essentially dissolves into biological soup before reforming.
Which felt… uncomfortably emotionally accurate.
Lab note:
AI becomes genuinely interesting when symbolic systems accidentally begin talking to each other.
6/9
One thing I learned quickly:
This project completely depended on restraint.
If the boxer became glamorous…
the whole thing collapsed.
If the visuals became “epic”…
the vulnerability disappeared.
So I leaned hard into:
• aftermath
• fatigue
• stillness
• silence
• emotional residue
The best shots weren’t action shots.
They were:
• trying to remove a glove
• sitting motionless
• breathing heavily
• avoiding eye contact with herself in the mirror
• a championship belt slipping from her lap
There’s something devastating about a person who succeeded and still looks broken.
Especially under a single overhead light.
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7/9
The actual production process looked like a small AI laboratory exploded across my desk.
Creative stack:
• Midjourney – image generation
• Audacity – pitch shifting and compression
• Flow Music – AI music generator tools
• Kdenlive – video editor
• LALAL.AI – stem splitter
• Midbot – Midjourney automation Chrome extension
Getting the boxer character stable required:
• consistent costume language
• consistent lighting
• reference image anchoring (–oref)
• emotional continuity
• aggressive prompt discipline
Otherwise Midjourney starts inventing alternate universes where your emotionally fragile boxer suddenly becomes:
• an MMA influencer
• a Marvel side character
• a shampoo commercial
AI remains deeply committed to improvisational nonsense.
Which is occasionally wonderful.
And occasionally expensive.
8/9
The real discovery here wasn’t technical.
It was emotional.
I think a lot of us are exhausted from performing invulnerability.
Especially rescuers.
Especially caretakers.
Especially people who became “the strong one” somewhere along the way.
Kryptonite suddenly stopped sounding like weakness to me.
Instead it sounded like:
the thing that proves you can still be hurt.
And maybe that’s why the butterfly imagery belongs there.
Because transformation isn’t elegant while it’s happening.
It’s messy.
Disorienting.
Private.
Sometimes you dissolve before you become something else.
TL;DR:
I slowed down a 2000s rock song and accidentally built a cinematic meditation on emotional survival.
Technology is weird.
Human beings are weirder.
9/9
The funny thing about AI filmmaking is that people assume the machine is doing the emotional work.
It isn’t.
The machine is the orchestra.
The human is still the conductor standing in the dark waving at ghosts trying to make meaning out of fragments.
That’s the real job.
Not generating images.
Not generating music.
Generating resonance.
And sometimes resonance arrives disguised as:
a tired boxer under a spotlight…
wearing a torn Superman logo…
while monarch butterflies quietly evolve nearby.
Which, admittedly, sounds exactly like the kind of sentence TerminallyBored.Monster was built for.
Steve Teare
video alchemist
TerminallyBored.Monster
Palouse, Washington USA