I thought I was making a quiet video. Then it started singing.
Sometimes the smallest idea makes the biggest mess.
This one began with a conversation, an interior monologue, and a simple question:
What does someone think about after spending time with a person who is completely exhausting and completely delightful?
I wanted to find out.
So I made MONDAY.
One woman. One evening. One interior monologue.
And, eventually, one very persistent Jackson 5 earworm.
2/9
The concept was deliberately small.
No elaborate plot.
No explosions.
No science-fiction machinery.
No one running through a burning building while looking meaningfully into the middle distance.
Just a woman coming home.
She takes off her shoes. She makes something to eat. She washes her face. She gets into bed.
And while she does all those ordinary things, we hear what she’s actually thinking.
The interesting part isn’t what happens.
It’s what she realizes happened.
3/9
Step 1: Start with the aftermath
The opening line is:
“Well. That was a lot.”
I wanted to begin after the important conversation rather than during it.
That decision gave me something I really like in storytelling: negative space.
We don’t know exactly what happened.
We don’t need to.
We know she is tired.
We know she feels better.
And we know there is someone occupying considerably more space in her head than she expected.
Lab note:
AI is very good at making things happen.
Sometimes the trick is asking it to make almost nothing happen.
4/9
Step 2: Let the house tell the story
I built the evening around a physical progression:
- Dusk outside
- Entryway
- Kitchen
- Living room
- Bathroom
- Bedroom
- Darkness
The lighting follows that progression too.
Warm practical lights dominate the early interior scenes. Later, the bedroom becomes cooler and quieter, with moonlight replacing the warmth of the house.
That gave the film a visual emotional arc without requiring anything particularly dramatic to happen on screen.
She is gradually moving inward.
Literally and emotionally.
5/9
Step 3: Build the woman carefully
The biggest technical problem was character consistency.
Thirty six-second shots meant thirty independent Midjourney generations.
So I created a locked character description:
Woman in her early 40s, medium-length dark auburn naturally wavy hair, hazel eyes, fair skin, oval face, understated attractive features, slim build, minimal natural makeup, intelligent composed presence.
Then I added the wardrobe and environmental details appropriate to each scene.
And I repeated the complete essential description in every prompt.
Not “same woman.”
Not “continue previous shot.”
Every prompt had to stand on its own.
Lab note:
Apparently my job as video alchemist now includes continuity supervisor, casting director, cinematographer, production designer and the person standing in the corner muttering, “No, her hair was not like that.”
6/9
Step 4: The emotional center
The heart of the monologue is this:
“I don’t want him to be less himself.
I just need room to breathe.”
That became the line around which I built the middle of the film.
I didn’t want to illustrate it literally.
No open windows.
No symbolic birds.
No woman dramatically stepping into sunlight.
She’s simply sitting there, thinking.
That’s enough.
The important realization is that boundaries don’t necessarily mean rejection.
Sometimes they mean making enough space for two people to remain themselves.
That was the emotional discovery the video was really about.
7/9
Step 5: Give the silence some room
The first ElevenLabs version came out too fast.
The words were all there.
Technically, it worked.
Emotionally, it didn’t.
So I went back into Audacity and started creating more space between thoughts.
That changed everything.
A line like:
“Good.”
followed by:
“Very good.”
needs a little air between it.
So does:
“Monday.”
followed by:
“I wonder what he’ll have thought of by then.”
The pauses became part of the performance.
Lab note:
Sometimes the thing missing from an AI performance isn’t emotion.
It’s time.
A human being doesn’t think in perfectly packed paragraphs.
Thoughts wander.
They stop.
They reconsider.
They surprise themselves.
I wanted the voiceover to do that.
8/9
Step 6: And then the Jackson 5 happened
I had an idea for the ending.
The woman is lying in bed.
She’s thinking about Monday.
And then an earworm from a song that had been humorously shared in their conversation begins playing in her head:
“Never Can Say Goodbye.”
The original instrumental was 82 BPM.
I tried slowing the instrumental down into something dreamy.
It became dreamy.
It also became considerably less recognizable.
So I changed tactics.
Instead of slowing the vocal into something that would sound like it had wandered in from another dimension, I kept the recognizable vocal and built a sparse D-major atmospheric bed underneath it.
Much better.
The joke isn’t that she’s listening to a song.
The joke is that her subconscious has apparently chosen the soundtrack.
And the song is telling on her.
9/9
The creative stack
Midjourney — character design, environments and cinematic stills
Grok — image-to-video conversion
ElevenLabs — female interior-monologue voice
Audacity — voiceover pacing, pauses and audio editing
Fadr AI — separating musical elements for experimentation
Kdenlive — final assembly, timing, transitions, sound and music
The final voiceover runs about 2:34.
Thirty primary six-second shots carry the story, with additional B-roll available for transitions and breathing room.
The Real Lesson
MONDAY reminded me that cinematic storytelling doesn’t always require bigger images.
Sometimes it requires smaller ones.
A hand putting keys on a table.
Shoes beside a bench.
Steam rising from dinner.
A sweater left on a chair.
Moonlight across a bed.
A woman lying awake in the dark.
The AI generated those images.
But the meaning came from deciding when to hold them, when to cut them, and when to leave the screen almost completely alone.
That’s the part I still find fascinating.
The tools can give me pixels, voices and musical fragments.
I get to decide what they mean when they are placed next to each other.
And occasionally, if I’m lucky, the machine gives me something I wasn’t quite expecting.
This time it gave me a woman who thinks she’s finished thinking about someone.
Then she gets to bed.
And apparently discovers that she isn’t.
TL;DR:
I made a quiet little film about emotional aftermath.
I learned that pauses matter.
I learned that less can carry more.
And I learned that if you put the Jackson 5 in someone’s subconscious at exactly the right moment, they may accidentally reveal more than they intended.
The video alchemist strikes again.
Steve Teare
video alchemist
TerminallyBored.Monster
Palouse, Washington USA