Sometimes a video starts with a story.
This one started with a thought I couldn’t quite leave alone.
What might a woman think after spending a little time with someone who is, by her own internal accounting, completely exhausting and completely delightful?
That was the seed for MONDAY.
One woman. One evening. One interior monologue.
No dialogue between the two characters. No explanation of the relationship. No grand revelation.
Just the quiet aftermath of connection.
2/9
The interesting part was that nothing dramatic needed to happen.
She comes home.
She takes off her shoes.
She makes something to eat.
She washes her face.
She gets into bed.
And while all of that is happening, we get to hear what is going on inside her head.
That sounds simple.
It wasn’t.
My first instinct was to make the visuals do too much. Then I realized that would defeat the whole point.
The woman isn’t having an adventure.
She’s thinking.
So I decided to make the evening itself the structure of the film.
Step 1: Get her home
The opening shots move from dusk outside to the quiet interior of her house.
She’s tired. Not devastated. Not miserable.
Just tired.
And somehow, despite being tired, she feels better.
That contradiction is where the story begins.
Lab note:
I like contradictions.
They tend to be where the interesting human stuff lives.
3/9
Step 2: Let the ordinary become intimate.
The kitchen became important.
I wanted her doing completely mundane things while her thoughts became progressively less mundane.
She opens the refrigerator.
She prepares something simple.
She sits down to eat.
Nothing visually spectacular happens.
That’s intentional.
The audience isn’t being asked to watch a plot unfold. They’re being invited to inhabit a private moment.
The camera gradually gets closer as her thoughts become more personal.
“He hears everything.”
That’s a wonderful thought because it contains two emotions at once.
Wonderful.
And slightly terrifying.
Then comes the bigger admission:
“I do feel safe with him.”
That changed the visual language.
The shots become quieter. The compositions become more intimate. She isn’t performing anymore.
Neither is the movie.
4/9
Step 3: The real subject is breathing.
The central line of the piece eventually arrived:
“I don’t want him to be less himself. I just need room to breathe.”
That became the emotional center.
And I deliberately didn’t illustrate it literally.
No dramatic opening of windows.
No woman running into a field.
No symbolic butterfly escaping a cage.
Please.
She’s sitting in a bedroom.
She’s simply realizing something.
She doesn’t want this person to become smaller or quieter or less intense.
She just needs enough space to remain herself while he’s being himself.
That felt much more interesting to me than the usual cinematic version of “setting boundaries.”
Lab note:
Sometimes the most useful thing an AI image can do is absolutely nothing spectacular.
A woman sitting on a bed and thinking can be more emotionally complicated than a spaceship exploding.
Although, admittedly, spaceships exploding are easier to sell.
5/9
Step 4: The evening gets quieter.
Once she understands that she needs room to breathe, the film starts physically moving toward bed.
Bathroom.
Mirror.
Washing her face.
Bedroom.
Lamp.
Darkness.
The lighting shifts gradually from the warm practical light of the house to cool moonlight.
The camera also pulls back.
That’s deliberate.
At the beginning, we’re observing her.
Toward the middle, we’re getting close to her.
At the end, we’re giving her space again.
The visual arc mirrors the emotional one.
She begins overwhelmed.
She becomes vulnerable.
She finds some understanding.
Then she is simply alone with herself.
And that’s when the little problem appears.
6/9
Step 5: Monday.
“And now he’s gone until Monday.”
Good.
Very good.
Except…
“Why am I slightly disappointed?”
Ah.
There it is.
The entire emotional equation changes in one sentence.
She apparently got used to him.
That happened fast.
And I love that she seems mildly surprised by this herself.
There is no declaration.
No romantic conclusion.
No sweeping statement about what they mean to one another.
Just:
“Monday.”
“I wonder what he’ll have thought of by then.”
Oops.
Then she catches herself.
“No. Don’t encourage him.”
And then the little betrayal:
“Although I am curious.”
That’s the ending.
Or at least it would have been the ending.
7/9
Step 6: The earworm.
I wanted one tiny piece of humor at the end.
Not a joke pasted onto the film.
Something that felt like it belonged to the relationship.
So I remembered a song that had been shared humorously in their Instagram conversation:
The Jackson 5’s “Never Can Say Goodbye.”
Perfect.
Except the original instrumental was too upbeat for the emotional space we’d created.
So I started experimenting.
The original track is 82 BPM.
I slowed the instrumental way down, trying roughly 58–60 BPM, hoping to turn it into something dreamy.
It worked technically.
It didn’t work emotionally.
Worse, it wasn’t recognizable enough.
Lab note:
Sometimes an experiment succeeds at exactly the wrong thing.
The instrumental became dreamy.
It also stopped sounding enough like the song I wanted the audience to recognize.
So I changed the plan.
8/9
Instead of slowing the vocal into some strange spectral version of itself, I decided to preserve the recognizable vocal and put it over a sparse, dreamy D-major drone.
That gives me the best of both worlds.
The music can feel nocturnal and suspended while the vocal remains unmistakably itself.
And suddenly the joke works.
She lies there thinking about Monday.
The room is quiet.
Then, somewhere inside her head:
“Never can say goodbye…”
And now the audience gets it.
She isn’t listening to a record.
Her brain has supplied its own soundtrack.
I love that because it doesn’t explain anything.
It just winks.
Watch Video At: MONDAY
Step 7: Making 30 shots behave.
The finished voiceover runs about 2:34 after I adjusted the pacing and added breathing room between the thoughts.
That means approximately thirty six-second visual shots.
Which sounds straightforward until you remember that AI image generation has a very strong opinion about continuity.
So I locked down the character.
Woman in her early 40s. Medium-length dark auburn naturally wavy hair. Hazel eyes. Fair skin. Oval face. Slim build. Minimal natural makeup. Charcoal-gray knit sweater. Dark straight-leg pants. Small silver earrings.
And when she gets ready for bed, the wardrobe changes appropriately.
Then I repeated the essential description in every Midjourney prompt.
Not “same woman.”
Not “as before.”
Every prompt stands on its own.
Because apparently I am now the keeper of the sacred continuity scroll.
9/9
The tools
Midjourney handled the still imagery.
I designed thirty independent prompts with consistent character description, environment, emotional state, lighting, lens choice and cinematic language.
The visual style stayed grounded in intimate, naturalistic indie drama rather than pushing toward anything obviously “AI.”
ElevenLabs handled the female interior voice.
Audacity handled the voiceover pacing, including the extra breathing room between thoughts.
Fadr AI gave me the ability to separate the musical elements of the Jackson 5 track so I could experiment with the instrumental components independently.
Kdenlive will bring everything together — voice, images, movement, ambient sound, music and those carefully timed silences.
The Real Lesson
MONDAY turned out to be less about technology than about restraint.
The AI tools can generate beautiful images all day long.
That’s not the hard part anymore.
The hard part is deciding when not to generate something spectacular.
A woman sitting quietly on a couch.
A woman looking at her reflection.
A woman lying awake in the dark.
Those moments don’t need visual fireworks.
They need attention.
The AI gives me the raw material. I get to decide what matters.
And sometimes the best thing I can do as the video alchemist is simply get out of the way and let a thought have six seconds to breathe.
TL;DR:
One woman.
One evening.
One interior monologue.
And apparently one very persistent earworm.
I started out trying to make a video about what she was thinking.
I ended up making one about what happens when someone quietly becomes part of your inner life.
And then I put the Jackson 5 in her head.
Because subtlety has its limits.
Steve Teare
video alchemist
TerminallyBored.Monster
Palouse, Washington USA