Twenty-three iterations later, I discovered I had actually been writing a character.
The embarrassing part is that I didn’t realize it until a week later.
There’s a peculiar kind of blindness that seems to accompany every creative project. You stare so hard at one piece of the puzzle that you fail to notice you’re quietly assembling the entire picture. Then one day you step back, squint, and think…
“Oh.”
That’s what happened here.
And I don’t think it was an accident.
I think AI was patiently revealing a story before I was ready to recognize it.
2/9
Like many of us, I’ve listened to Hans Zimmer’s Wonder Woman theme more times than I can count.
Not because I wanted to imitate it.
Because I wanted to understand why it works.
Strip away the electric cello.
Ignore the taiko drums.
Forget the orchestra.
At its core, that piece isn’t about a superhero.
It’s about resolve.
It sounds like someone who has already been knocked down… and has quietly decided that staying there is no longer an option.
That emotional DNA fascinated me.
So I opened Flow Music AI and started chasing a feeling instead of a melody.
That turned out to be much harder than I expected.
Lab note:
AI is remarkably literal when you ask for instruments.
It’s surprisingly insightful when you ask for emotions.
3/9
The score refused to be born.
Version one sounded like a movie trailer.
Version four sounded like every other movie trailer.
Version nine was technically impressive and emotionally vacant.
Version thirteen tried too hard.
Version seventeen forgot it had a heartbeat.
By version twenty-one I was beginning to wonder if I was the problem.
Actually…
I was.
I kept telling the AI what I wanted to hear instead of describing what I wanted someone to feel.
The moment I changed that, everything shifted.
Not instantly.
But unmistakably.
Twenty-three versions later…
there it was.
Not perfect.
Alive.
Lab note:
The difference between “epic” and “moving” is usually twenty-two failed experiments.
power v23
Modern cinematic battle epic. Intro: Extreme sonic violence, zero melody. Piercing, high-pitched theremin wailing cranked to 11, screaming and spectral. Violent, jarring electric cello stabs with maximum Big Muff fuzz distortion. Layered with harsh industrial noise, metallic grinding, and cold silences. Climax: Explosive 160 bpm death metal, machine-gun double-pedal kick drumming, aggressive buzzsaw cellos, massive wall of sound. Raw, unhinged intensity.
4/9
Then life happened.
Other videos.
Other experiments.
Other rabbit holes to disappear into.
The music sat quietly on my hard drive like an unread letter.
A week later I began building “The Subterranean: Getting Up.”
A man buried beneath impossible weight.
A man who has every logical reason to quit.
A man hearing the darkness whisper…
Stay down.
I assembled the narration.
My brother Brad generated images and video.
Adjusted pacing.
Massaged transitions.
Then, almost absentmindedly, I dragged that forgotten music onto the timeline.
I remember the exact feeling.
Not excitement.
Recognition.
The strange sensation that two strangers had just discovered they’d been twins all along.
5/9
That’s when the project taught me something I wasn’t looking for.
The music wasn’t illustrating the film.
The music understood the film before I did.
Read that sentence again.
It’s subtle, but it completely changed the way I think about creating with AI.
I wasn’t composing accompaniment.
I was uncovering emotional architecture.
Every project has one.
An invisible skeleton beneath the dialogue, the images, and the editing.
Find that skeleton, and every creative decision suddenly becomes easier.
Miss it…
and no amount of visual polish can save the work.
Lab note:
Stories don’t begin with scenes.
They begin with emotional gravity.
Everything else simply falls into orbit.
6/9
The creative stack
Here’s the orchestra behind this little miracle.
• Flow Music AI — discovering emotional rhythm
• ChatGPT — helping me think out loud, music prompt writing
• ElevenLabs — voiceover, lending voices to ghosts
• Audacity — normalization, cropping, sanding rough edges
• Kdenlive — editor, where everything finally learns to breathe
People often ask which AI tool is the most important.
That’s like asking whether the violin or the conductor deserves credit for the symphony.
Neither.
The magic lives in the conversation between them.
I still think of myself as a video alchemist.
Not because I make gold.
Because I spend an unreasonable amount of time mixing strange ingredients together until something unexpected begins to glow.
7/9
I’ve started questioning the phrase “happy accident.”
Bob Ross made it famous.
Artists love it.
I don’t anymore.
Twenty-three iterations aren’t accidental.
They’re disciplined curiosity.
The accident wasn’t creating the music.
The accident was discovering where it belonged.
That’s an entirely different phenomenon.
It’s more like archaeology.
You don’t invent the buried city.
You uncover it.
Maybe AI works the same way.
Maybe it doesn’t manufacture creativity nearly as much as it excavates possibilities that were already hiding beneath the surface.
That thought has been following me around.
I rather like its company.
8/9
So what did I actually learn?
Quite a lot.
- Feelings sometimes prompt AI better than technical specifications.
- Every failed generation narrows the search space.
- Save everything good.
Future Steve often thanks Past Steve.
- Music reveals character faster than dialogue.
- Persistence is cheaper than inspiration.
- The subconscious is apparently allowed to collaborate with algorithms.
That last one still makes me smile.
The more I work with AI, the less the process feels mechanical.
Oddly enough…
does it ever feel more human?
Only humans can do that.
9/9
When people imagine AI-assisted filmmaking, they often picture speed.
Automation.
Efficiency.
Those things are real.
But they’re not what keeps pulling me back.
I keep coming back because every so often the machine quietly hands me something I didn’t know I was searching for.
Not the finished answer.
Just enough truth to continue the journey.
The soundtrack for “The Subterranean” wasn’t a happy accident.
It was a patient one.
It waited on a musical feeling until I finally caught up with it.
Maybe that’s the real lesson.
As video alchemists, we don’t simply direct AI.
Sometimes, if we’re paying attention, AI gently directs us toward the story we were meant to tell all along.
TL;DR
The twenty-third iteration didn’t create the music.
It revealed the story.
And that’s a distinction I don’t think I’ll ever forget.
Steve Teare
video alchemist
TerminallyBored.Monster
Palouse, Washington USA