Begin Again

This started as an experiment in making a longer AI-driven music video, but it turned into an earnest little short film about evil robots, software engineers, meetings, and the strange comedy of solving impossible problems without ever reaching for a weapon. The song began as recursive poetry I was writing to mess with low-end political bots on X. Halfway through, I realized it had a loose Grateful Dead / Uncle John’s Band kind of feeling, so I used Suno to push it into a rambling jam-band track that was in no hurry to get anywhere. Then I remixed it until the vocal felt right. For the video, I wanted to improve on the last one. Less forced lip-syncing. More silent-film energy. More hammy melodrama. More story. AI is surprisingly good at big theatrical gestures when you lean into it, and silent-film language gave me a way to make the acting feel intentional instead of broken. The story was built iteratively with Mini, my ChatGPT agent, and Nora, my more technical Codex agent. I wrote the concept, brainstormed the weak spots, storyboarded it in GPT-Image, organized it in Grok Canvas, then used Grok Imagine and Kling for animatics and final clips. I edited the whole thing in my personalized OpenShot fork, which I’ll be publishing soon. The big idea: in most evil robot stories, the second you see the robots, you know a gunfight is coming. So I thought: what if the evil robots accidentally ran into the most competent software engineering team on the planet? These are people who solve problems with meetings, not violence. If you’re on a cruise ship with your boss and evil robots attack, you had best believe there’s going to be a meeting about it. There is always time for a meeting. That joke became the spine of the whole thing. Corporate AI initiatives, dumb evil robots, water escalation, slapstick, movie shorthand, and a little jam-band sincerity all folded together into Begin Again. Made in four days with AI. Hope you enjoy it.