A little over a year ago, my boss shared a video published in The Wall Street Journal with my team titled We Made This Film With AI. It’s Wild and Slightly Terrifying.

We all mocked its bloopers but marveled at its humor and honest take on how to create a decent video using generative AI tools.

Most of what we had seen or discussed in team meetings up to that point featured characters with six fingers or bodies collapsing under their own limbs. There really wasn’t another word for the medium at the time besides “slop.”

Fast forward eight months, and I asked my company to pay for an AI filmmaking course. I ended up using the exact same tools as the Journal.

Actually, it was two 12-hour courses covering everything from using LLMs like ChatGPT to write scripts, MidJourney to create frames, Google Veo to generate video, ElevenLabs to handle dialogue, Suno for the soundtrack, and Canva to tie it all together.

On nights and weekends, I invested about 20 hours in smaller assignments that led up to one Capstone project.

I completed both courses and made several videos. Since one of them hasn’t been approved by my company yet, I figured I’d share the first one instead — along with the process behind it.

The video

Behold the weirdest creative concept I’ve ever dreamt up:

Somewhere between the assignments and the deadlines, I decided the best use of that opportunity was to create a superhero origin story about a guy who gets superpowers and uses them to destroy predatory debt systems.

I work at a debt solutions company that markets content. Since the company was paying, this felt like a natural direction.

The character is Aaron Mason — The Debtonator.

He’s a blue-collar worker, a veteran, and a devoted family man who quietly buried his household in debt, trying to give everyone a better life. Then he gets a terminal diagnosis. Then someone offers him a way out.

Then things get weird.

The concept came first. Then I had to figure out how to actually make it.

How to be your own production studio

The stack I ended up using: ChatGPT handled the story development and script.

MidJourney handled the character references and scene frames using omni-reference, which was the part of this whole process that genuinely surprised me — watching a consistent character show up across scenes felt like a real unlock.

Google Veo generated the video sequences. ElevenLabs did the voiceover. Suno wrote and produced the soundtrack. Canva edited it all together.

This image shows my thinking of each tool with Eleven Labs as the Voice Director, Suno as the SoundBooth, and the scenes in the Art Department:

I have no video production background. None. The fact that this exists as a finished thing is still a little strange to me.

Like anyone who knows little about creative projects, I used the “creative software for dummies” – Canva:

Is it good? I genuinely don't know. It's weird. The chains scene is weird. There's a folder that stands up by itself in one shot that makes no sense. The ending is abrupt. I know all of this.

But it went from a concept to a finished video in a way that wasn't possible for someone like me six months ago, and that's the part worth talking about.

Will The Debtonator return? Probably not. Will I continue making weird AI videos? You betcha. I’ll go over another video I’ve been “monkeying around” with when I hear back from the C suite of my company…