I built a blues song on an alien planet
The song started with rain.
Not real rain. Not the kind that falls over the wheat fields outside my window in Palouse, Washington. This was midnight rain falling on a world that does not exist.
A lonely street. A slide guitar crying somewhere in the distance. Two strangers finding each other under strange skies.
That was the seed for Midnight Rain.
I wanted to make something that felt like an old electric blues record had somehow survived thousands of years and been discovered on another planet.
Which, when I say it out loud, sounds completely reasonable. Right?
Welcome to my brain.
2/9
The original idea was much simpler.
A man and a woman. A rainy night. A blues club. A moment of connection.
Then my imagination did what it always does.
It opened a door.
Behind that door was an alien civilization that somehow blended ancient Nordic architecture, Egyptian astronomy, and futuristic technology.
Not aliens with tentacles.
Not green monsters.
Not another movie where everyone looks like they are angry because they just walked out of a vampire convention.
I wanted something different.
I wanted humans living in a place that was alien.
The planet became the character.
Lab note:
One of the biggest lessons I keep learning with AI art is that sometimes the best way to make something unusual is not to make the subject unusual.
Make the world unusual.
3/9
Step 1: Finding the visual language
The first challenge was the characters.
My initial experiments tried to make the lovers themselves alien.
That was a mistake.
Midjourney immediately started interpreting “alien” as a creature design problem.
Suddenly I had blue skin, strange faces, horror movie lighting, and characters who looked like they were waiting to explain why humans should leave their spaceship immediately.
The emotion disappeared.
The story disappeared.
The romance disappeared.
So I changed direction.
The characters became human.
The civilization became alien.
That single decision changed everything.
The couple could remain emotionally familiar while the world carried the mystery.
Lab note:
Sometimes creativity is not adding more.
Sometimes creativity is removing the thing that is getting in the way.
4/9
Step 2: Building the world
The color palette became the foundation.
I moved away from the traditional gold-and-sand Egyptian look.
It was beautiful, but it pushed the images toward treasure rooms and fantasy kingdoms.
Instead, I chose:
Black obsidian stone
Gunmetal architecture
Brushed steel accents
Silver engravings
Deep cobalt moonlight
Cold metallic reflections
The civilization became ancient, but not primitive.
It felt like a culture that had been traveling among the stars for thousands of years.
The temples were not ruins.
They were still alive.
They were built by people who understood both mythology and technology.
That combination fascinated me.
5/9
Step 3: The Midjourney character challenge
This was probably the most frustrating part of the process.
Keeping characters consistent in AI image generation is still one of the hardest problems.
Midjourney is incredibly powerful.
It is also occasionally like working with a very talented artist who forgets what you told them five minutes ago.
“Remember this person?”
Midjourney:
“Of course.”
“Great. Keep them consistent.”
Midjourney:
“Absolutely.”
“And keep the same face.”
Midjourney:
“Here is someone who looks like their cousin who moved away.”
Creative collaboration has its quirks.
For this project, I used character reference images and kept the female character as the visual anchor in scenes where both characters appeared.
That helped maintain continuity.
Lab note:
AI does not remove the need for directing.
It increases the need for directing.
The tools are not replacing the filmmaker.
They are becoming the orchestra.
Someone still has to conduct.
6/9
Step 4: Creating the cinematic language
The goal was not a collection of pretty images.
The goal was a 3-minute music video.
Every shot needed to support the emotional arc.
The visual progression became:
A lonely man walking through an unfamiliar city.
A woman waiting outside a blues club.
A chance meeting.
Music pulling two strangers together.
A dance.
A connection.
A goodbye.
A promise.
The alien planet became a metaphor.
Sometimes we are all strangers on another planet.
Sometimes we are just looking for someone who recognizes the song playing inside us.
7/9
Tools & Creative Stack
Midjourney
Character creation, environments, cinematic stills, world building
Grok Imagine
Image-to-video experimentation and motion tests
ElevenLabs
Voice and narration possibilities
FLOW MUSIC / AI music tools
Blues-rock composition and musical atmosphere
Kdenlive
Editing, timing, transitions, and final assembly
ChatGPT
Story development, prompt engineering, creative problem solving
Budget:
The biggest investment was not money. 3-minute video production is costing under $3 dollars each.
It wasn’t iteration. Getting the prompts right took the most time — even with AI assisting.
AI tools make creation faster, but they do not make decisions faster.
The bottleneck moves from production to imagination.
You can create thousands of possibilities.
The challenge is knowing which one deserves to exist.
And what to avoid to prevent failure in Midjourney.
8/9
The Real Lesson
The most interesting discovery from Midnight Rain was that the alien world was never really about aliens.
It was about distance.
The distance between two people.
The distance between loneliness and connection.
The distance between an idea in my head and something that finally appears on the screen.
The AI tools surprised me.
They were not just image generators.
They became creative mirrors.
They reflected back possibilities I would not have found alone.
Sometimes they were wrong.
Sometimes they misunderstood.
Sometimes they created something completely unusable.
And sometimes they made a happy accident that revealed the thing I was actually trying to create.
Those are my favorite moments.
The accidents.
The moments where the machine says:
“Did you mean this?”
And I answer:
“No.”
Then five seconds later:
“Actually… yes.”
9/9
The final moral:
The future of creativity is not humans versus machines.
It is humans directing machines toward things that still feel human.
A computer can generate a thousand alien cities.
It cannot decide why one lonely person walking through the rain matters.
That part still belongs to us.
I am still learning this strange new craft.
I am still experimenting.
I am still breaking things.
And occasionally, somewhere between a failed prompt and a lucky accident, a little bit of magic appears.
That is the fun part.
That is the alchemy.
Addendum: The monster was already there.
When I first built Midnight Rain, I thought I had the story.
Two people.
A strange planet.
A blues club glowing in the darkness.
A moment of connection between two lonely souls.
It was beautiful.
It was also missing something.
I woke up one morning with the feeling that the story had a hole in it.
Not a technical problem.
Not a missing shot.
A missing truth.
My intuition was tapping me on the shoulder saying:
“There is something else on this planet.”
The world I had created was too safe.
Beautiful, yes.
Mysterious, yes.
But too safe.
A love story on an alien planet should not happen in a world without consequences.
The planet needed teeth.
Lab note:
This is one of the strangest parts of working with AI tools.
The computer can generate thousands of images.
It cannot tell me what the story is missing.
That still comes from somewhere else.
The human part.
The uncomfortable little voice that says, “You are close, but not finished.”
Step 1: Introducing the monsters
I added four monster sequences into the dance scene.
At first, they were simply visual contrast.
The couple was inside dancing.
Warm light.
Music.
Movement.
Connection.
Outside:
A dangerous world.
Darkness.
Unknown creatures.
Hidden threats.
But as I edited the sequence, something unexpected happened.
The monsters stopped being just monsters.
They became part of the story.
Step 2: The final awakening
The biggest change came at the end.
After the kiss.
After the emotional peak.
The story does not simply fade away.
A set of enormous doors opens.
Then the final monster appears.
It roars as the singer says:
“I’ll be comin’ back for you.”
That was the moment the meaning changed.
The monster was not the ending.
The monster was the awakening.
They did not create the danger.
They awakened something that was already there.
That idea completely changed how I saw the entire video.
The passion between these two characters did not make the world less dangerous.
It made them more alive inside that danger.
Step 3: The deeper story
The monsters represent the things that exist beneath the surface.
The wild things.
The powerful things.
The things that cannot be controlled.
Sometimes those things are frightening.
Sometimes they are exactly what makes life worth living.
The danger is not always something to defeat.
Sometimes it is evidence that something has awakened.
Lab note:
The best creative discoveries are often not planned.
They arrive as a feeling before they become an explanation.
The rational part of me wants to build stories from outlines and structures.
The creative part of me occasionally wakes me up and says:
“We are not done yet.”
I have learned to listen.
Step 4: The unexpected collaboration
This is why I love this strange new process of creating with AI.
The tools are not simply following instructions.
They are part of a conversation.
I make a choice.
The image reveals something.
I respond.
The story changes.
The final result is not exactly what I imagined when I started.
It is something discovered along the way.
The monster gave Midnight Rain its real meaning.
Without it, the video was a beautiful moment.
With it, the video became a question.
What happens when something inside us wakes up?
Do we run from it?
Do we try to silence it?
Or do we learn how to carry that fire?
Maybe the monster is not always the enemy.
Maybe sometimes the monster is the part of ourselves that reminds us we are still alive.
Steve Teare
video alchemist
TerminallyBored.Monster
Palouse, Washington USA