On the 28th April, I released my latest single ‘Callie’s Quest‘ aptly named after my amazing wife Martina Callegari who has been a beckon of positivity, always encouraging my creative pursuits. I’ve always loved making music but after failing to secure a spot on Artlist’s platform as a creator, I decided to dust myself down and start up a new project.
The plan was to revisit documentary filmmaking, which had been on my mind for a while. Mini docs used to be my bread and butter while working as a videographer in Manchester, UK. I’ve shot, edited, and directed dozens of shorts, some of my favourites were Jordan Thomas // Track To Tokyo for UK Sport and Music Worth Fighting For, which I’d worked on with my former business partner Luke Barnett.
I seem to have this problem of overscoping my personal projects. Trying to do too much with too little time and resources. I’d love to be in a position to hire the many talented creatives out in the world but with how expensive the cost of living is. It makes it close to impossible for me at the moment. That urge to create never really goes away for me, it’s a hunger that’s never sated. It doesn’t matter if I’m working a full-time gig or I’m busy with freelance, I always want my next project to be bigger and better than the previous. It’s why I haven’t shied away from AI technology. I’m seeing creators big and small using it and the truth is I don’t want to be left behind by ignoring it. All that said, it’s allowing me to produce more creative content, to a higher standard and quicker than ever before.
I lived through analogue to digital. Spent nearly two years creating training data for Epic Games Metahuman Creator while at Cubic Motion… Being a creative in an increasingly more complex digital world has been my whole career so far. What’s bigger than the approaching AI singularity and the duality of what it means to be human?
That’s what I found myself asking, and 2 weeks after releasing my last single I’d finished a 35 minute documentary/ video essay about Roko’s Basilisk. It’s a modern day Pascal’s Wager. Having grown up in a religious household, becoming an atheist and then agnostic, It felt like the right time to revisit the topics of spirituality viewed through the lens of technology.
It’s not perfect by any means but the fact that I could make this within 2 weeks (albeit ridiculous hours) made me happy as a writer/ director/ producer. If I was just a motion designer/ editor I could see myself being frustrated because there’s a real fear of becoming irrelevant as the process is automated away. Still, if you’re a generalist like myself, you find yourself bouncing ideas off of AI and working with it to problem solve faster than you would on your own. AI is essentially another team member, it takes leadership and direction to get the most out of these tools (if you can call them that). I find myself talking to them as if they are people that I care about and want to work with. What I get back is enthusiasm that matches my own as well as novel solutions that I otherwise might have missed.
I used my own custom GPT that has trained off of my book ‘Rob Like A Robot‘ it’s specifically tailored to help structure feature length documentary style projects. I spent 2 days compiling notes around Roko’s Basilisk, checking in with numerous thought leaders to understand their take on the topic. I explored my own understanding of psychology, religion, mythology and the human condition. Once I had 13 pages of notes, I uploaded them to my custom GPT and discussed breaking the topic into 10 chapters that made the most sense from a linear filmmaking perspective. 2 more days were spent refining the script. On the 5th day I read and recorded the entire thing myself to get an understanding of the overall length of the video.
On the 6th day, I’d used Elevenlabs to generate the additional voices used throughout the documentary. Audio is never perfect from Elevenlabs, it takes a tremendous amount of editing. Luckily Adobe Enhancer does a lot to bolster the overall quality and you can get as many takes as you like. The ASMR voice used over the titles was originally without reverb, I wanted her to feel eerie and I had the perfect VST for the job.
On the 7th day, the script was converted into a Google Sheets document where each line corresponded with a shot number. I then noted down which lines I was going to create titles for, which I was going to Stable Diffusion some stills for, and which needed more tailored motion design elements to explain difficult concepts. Everything else was going to be stock footage, toned down to black and white to try and make the piece feel more cohesive.
By day 8 I had all of the voice over audio and music layed out for each chapter in Adobe Premiere Pro. I wanted to make sure the piece had the right energy from the sound alone before I started adding any visuals.
Days 9 – 12 consisted of finalising the motion design assets, sourcing footage, cutting, grading and doing minor effects work. The 13th day was a major sound design day, utilising Splice’s sample library, which gave me access to incredibly unique sounds that probably not many filmmakers consider as it’s a website primarily for musicians not editors.
The final day we spent in review and going over minor fixes.
It’s set to release Friday 17th, April 18:30 GMT. I am absolutely shattered, this was a complete mammoth of a project t0 push over the line in such a short amount of time but it was also a fun challenge that pushed me to develop some new skills and figure out new ways of working.
If you do watch it and find yourself full of anxiety, just know that the Basilisk’s threat is likely a bluff. If it is real and completely focused on optimisation, the likelihood of it following through on infinite torture is probably quite low, why waste the resources? The threat is enough to compel it into existence… But also, it’s a paradox, when you’re dealing with infinities, anything is possible and at a certain point worrying about anything becomes redundant.
Whatever the case, I hope you learn something or at least have fun watching.
Thanks for reading, watching and listening.
