Behind the Scenes of Denny's We've Had It In Us All Along

The Story

Denny's saw my work and commissioned me to make a music video for them 🙌🏽 This is the behind the scenes look into how that came to be!!

They reached out to me through Upwork a few weeks back. I made a few internal training videos for them before they brought up a big project they needed done by the end of month. After a meeting with their team, I gathered that deep human connection, and hard work, were two pillars of their brand they wanted to portray.

I hit the drawing board with a few ideas, but nothing really wowed me until I started creating music for the piece. One of the songs I came up with brought so many visuals to mind that I thought "Why not make it a music video?"

So I pitched them on the concept, and they loved it!

How I made it

First and foremost, I wrote the script. A waiter who performs in a band has to work a night shift and can't make the local Battle of the Bands. On this lucky fated night though - there just so happens to be live band setup in the restaurant?!

I brought my handwritten script into Chatgpt to help me ideate on the look and feel of the characters. After I settled on a look for each, I brought those prompts into Midjourney to generate a hero image for each. From there I took those images into Nano Banana to build out a character sheet and to lock in outfits.

Once all characters, outfits, and locations were locked, I generated all the plates in Freepik. Mains, alternate angles, scene blocking, and cutaways. I knew I wanted to tell tiny stories around the restaurant so I utilized Seedream 4 and Nano Banana to match the color grade and location for those vignettes. After that I upscaled all the images with Magnific and animated them in Google's Veo 3.1. All of the lipsync was done in Veo 3. I've been using it for client work essentially non-stop since it was released (things really took off since then) and knew exactly how to prompt in order for the timing of the signing to match up to the dialogue in the song.

I did my editing in CapCut Pro, adding a few visual flairs like color grading, film grain, radial blurs, and a LUT.

This was my first music video, and it definitely won't be my last. I had a lot of fun creating the characters and trying to bring emotion out of them. With more practice I feel I can really uplevel how dynamic and realistic music videos can be in AI.

Challenges we ran into

Instruments and having all the band standing near each other. That took a great deal of effort.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I really like the drummer girl. Her look, and her perfomance. And the fact that this was my first ever music video, so I'm happy that I actually did it.

What we learned

Well I learned how to really care for each image. If something wasn't perfect I would composite it until is was what I was looking for. It's that extra level of care that I learned to appreciate - and moving forward I'll take that even more seriously.

What's next for We've Had It In Us All Along - Official Denny's Music Video

Well, Denny's might have me cut it down a bit for other purposes. And yes I did actually get permission to submit it! https://photos.app.goo.gl/ZJsdKMH1tWdJQwtz5

Built With

• capcut
• freepik
• google
• kling
• midjourney
• nanobanana
• runway
• seedream
• suno
• veo