1. Why I Even Made the Thing (the panic-birth origin story)
So tell me all about the video making.
Well the idea came from panic and confusion when i remembered that i had a hot seat slot later in the day and there were so may self important world changing ideas all trying to get out at the same time that the exit (or is it the world entry point) was blocked and nothing had come out? to be honest the only time that anybody or anything even vaguely real turns up is at the very last second and so it proved to be the case on that fateful sunday when i decided – fuck it – just make a video instead and all of those hours watching video and seeing folks turning out great examples of video skill and more importantly of storytelling skill simply unfurled on screen in front of me so i decided to do exactly the same as i am doing now and turned on the scrobblet machine which eradicates ALL text if there is a gap of more than 5 seconds and so i practised and practised and bombed and failed and fell apart and then thought hmmmm instead of trying to be so clever and acceptable ben why not just watch a short film of what is going on in your head and boom that was it! the secret writer on any project is in fact the video editor and so with a decent narrator and a way of cutting through different scene transitions the rest was easy. bacause a narrator simply talks and the scene transitions editor simply creates emotions and foreshadowing in the viewer in the WAY they light and the angles and sweeps and swoops through the scene so there is no need for conscious direction there – simply let the unconscious lead – in other words ben, once again, simply get out of your own way and let the story tell itself. just show up. so thats exactly what i did, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Pointer to the book trailer here (yes, the refugees being pursued through a digital Dantean inferno for entertainment and data farming purposes are in fact the protagonists.
2. The Compelling Event (aka the moment the universe pushed me into getting on with it)
so there i was, staring at this script outline — not even a real script, more like a polite suggestion of one — and i realised i had, what, four hours before i had to show something? the sort of time frame that makes normal people say “nope this is impossible” but for me it’s the exact moment my brain finally wakes up and whispers: “hi ben. fancy doing something ridiculous?”
the compelling event wasn’t inspiration. it was survival. it was “you need something to show and you’ve got a blank page and a deadline and a growing suspicion that if you wait for a perfect idea you’ll die waiting.”
so i grabbed onto the only stable thing in the room: the fact that video doesn’t lie, it is the viewer that lies. Their entire life is predicated on a teeny tiny lie.
and the moment i hit record — well — the story finally walked in. late, as usual, but wearing a nice coat and pretending like it had been there the whole time.
3. How I Actually Made the Trailer (the messy truth)
Step 1: talk first, think later
i took the script outline and inflated it like some weird creative balloon animal. rambling voiceover, scene cues, half-thoughts, bits of emotion — the whole thing poured out in about 30 minutes because i use flow writing all the time and i have grown accustomed to the fact that if i pause for more than FIVE SECONDS the entire draft is programmed to collapse into /dev/null - total erasure and therefore if I stopped to think I’d freeze. and freezing means death. or at least missing lunch.
then i threw it into Descript and let an AI voice read it back at me, which was surreal and oddly comforting because the machine sounded more confident about my words than i ever do. i tweaked a few bits of the text to fix pacing or awkward lumps, but mostly i let it be messy and alive.
Step 2: visuals that felt like feelings
with the audio track lined up, i went hunting for images and clips, not in a logical way (logic had left the building hours ago), but in a “what does this line FEEL like?” way.
despair = fog and broken cities
hope = wide shots with light leaking in
mystery = someone looking left for no reason whatsoever
i dragged whatever felt right onto the timeline and didn’t overthink it. the unconscious is weirdly good at editing.
I also have subscriptions for the magnificent pixeldojo.ai and the equally amazing morphic.
Step 3: build the emotional pulse
once the bones were there, i started massaging transitions, cutting clips, nudging beats.
music was critical — i needed something that built and broke and built again, like an argument with the universe. so i listened to Coltrane spotify radio the entire time, as you do.
Step 4: polish without strangling it 🙈
the last hour was a blur of tiny adjustments. a frame here, a pause there, making sure the whole thing moved like it was breathing — not too fast, not too slow, just alive.
i watched it three times and each time i thought, “oh god this is not bad enough to delete. Actually its really good” and each time i made a few tweaks and somehow it got better.
and then i exported it before i could ruin it.
always export before you ruin it.
4. What I Learned (accidentally) About Making Things Fast
Speed writing and flow and AI tools don’t make you lazy; they make you honest.
the first draft is wrapped inside panic — take off the plastic bag facemask and let it breathe.
stock footage is your friend, it shouts ‘fill in the blanks later, keep going, byyyyyee’ and is a cheat code for emotions.
perfection is the enemy of many a decent quote.
showing up beats planning every single time.
and most importantly:
you can make something good, fast, if you stop trying to be clever and just let the story tell itself.
which, in hindsight, is probably the moral of this entire thing.
If you’d like, I can also:
format this as a Medium-ready post,
turn it into a spoken-word script,
create a shorter version,
or rewrite it again with even more or less chaos depending on how strong you want the flavour to be.