What this series is about?
Carl Jung’s The Red Book was released to the public in October 2009, almost a century after he began working on it between 1913 and 1921. Jung had collaborated closely with Sigmund Freud until their split in 1913, after which Jung entered a period of intense inner exploration.
Around that time, Jung recorded vivid visions: flooding across Europe, mass death, a continent “washed” in blood. A year later, Europe entered the First World War. Whether those visions were prophecy, pattern-recognition, anxiety, or something more symbolic, Jung treated them as meaningful, and followed them inward, deliberately, to map the forces shaping his psyche: persona, shadow, desire, fear, and (in his own language) soul.
This series is an attempt to take that work seriously. Not to sensationalise it, but to ask a practical question: what can The Red Book teach us about meaning, fear, and the stories we tell ourselves when the world feels unstable?
Why I’m making this?
A couple of months ago I woke up in the middle of the night with a rare kind of clarity, the “quiet certainty” you don’t get often. The idea arrived fully formed: make a series exploring The Red Book, and use it as a craft challenge, as well as a research project, writing, presenting, storytelling, editing, with something useful on the other side.
Part of the urgency is due to the times we’re living through. When conflict in Europe escalates, it’s hard not to notice how quickly stability can feel conditional. I’m not trying to predict the future, but I do think introspection matters more in anxious times, as the fear can permiate into our culture. It becomes politics. It becomes behaviour. Jung’s work is one of the most direct attempts I know of to meet that fear internally rather than outsource it.
And at a more personal level: I don’t want to drift through the next decade passively consuming commentary. I’d rather build something, and build it with intent.
Why the production approach is mixed-media (and includes AI)?
One practical problem: The Red Book is full of imagery that’s intensely visual, symbolic, and often surreal. To do it justice traditionally would require huge time, specialist craft, or a very large budget. At the same time, the themes feel timely, so waiting “until I can afford it” doesn’t make much sense.
That’s where the modern tools become useful. Used carefully, they allow an independent creator to visualise material that would otherwise be inaccessible, as long as you treat the output as raw material, not a finished style. My approach is mixed-media: building a coherent visual language, then using AI-generated elements as components that I art-direct, edit, and integrate through a more traditional post pipeline.
On the research side, I’ve used tools like Perplexity and NotebookLM to sanity-check interpretations and cross-reference details in the manuscript, not as an authority, but as a faster way to catch mistakes and surface alternative readings.
Visually, I’ve taken cues from Jung’s own illustrations, a blend of illuminated-manuscript detail, abstraction, and private symbolism, then used that as a style constraint. From there: generation, selection, compositing, paintover, layout and motion, with Photoshop and After Effects doing the heavy lifting. The goal isn’t “AI aesthetic”. The goal is authored coherence.
Why use AI for parts of this at all?
Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious describes shared psychological patterns, archetypes, instincts, repeating motifs across culture. There’s a quiet symmetry in using machine learning systems trained on large-scale cultural material to help visualise a project rooted in shared human symbolism. Not because the machine “understands” the symbols, but because it can help surface forms and textures that feel dream-adjacent, which suits The Red Book.
More importantly, this is about creative agency. I understand why people are uneasy about AI, the ethics, the economics, the speed of change. I’ve had the same discomfort. But blanket dismissal doesn’t protect your creativity; it often just delays your ability to navigate reality.
Used responsibly, these tools can help tell stories where footage doesn’t exist, where locations are impossible, or where the budget simply isn’t there. Big creators are already doing that, and so are the companies many of us work with. My view is simple: learn how it works, decide where you draw your line, and stay in control of your process.
This series is partly an argument, in practice: storytelling is becoming more accessible, and creators shouldn’t surrender their voice out of fear. You don’t have to love the tools, but you do need to understand them.
