Inspiration
It was inspired by the three days I spent staring at a blank document, trying to write the first bar of this song. In that time, I suddenly and inexplicably developed a deep, urgent need to do, EVERY other thing. "Procrasti-Nation" comes from that specific, bizarre paralysis of the modern mind. We all carry these massive, novel-length to-do lists in our heads—these grand ambitions and creative goals. But when it's time to actually execute, the magnetic pull of any other task becomes impossibly strong. I wanted to dissect the feeling behind that. It’s not just laziness. It’s a complex, internal war between the part of you that wants to build an empire and the part of you that just really needs to know what the weather is like in a city you'll never visit. The real joke, of course, is that in the process of making a video about not working, I ended up in this obsessive, weeks-long technical rabbit hole with Google's AI tools. It became the ultimate act of productive procrastination. This whole project is my master's thesis in avoiding whatever I was probably supposed to be doing instead.
What it does
I tried to visualize the comedic act of me procrastinating the lyrics of the song itself. The setting is an old NY apartment , something i only ever seen in some old movies ....a somewhat charming backdrop that also acts to ground the viewer a bit. After all we talking about high-tech AI stuff....so what better way as to have something aery familiar displayed. Next step was the story, which is pretty easy broken down. It shows one entire day of me working on music. I get up, have breakfast, have all the ambition to write my stuff and than.....nothing... yeah i rather doom scroll for the next half an hour or entertain my dogs (I have Husky's in real life) so the choice here was simple and i could inject a lil bit more personal stuff into the project again. We Proceed to do everything else but what I'm supposed to do....and yes i run multiple times to the kitchen to get a snack (and so do you btw)! Faced with a deadline , i pick up the pace. Funny thing about me and my songwriting, ....I am quite chaotic, meaning i have verses , hooks, parts of verses ...all that scattered around (mostly virtually in like 100 different notepads) so i tried to make something entertaining out of this search for stuff i can use to help me finish my song and my Husky ends up helping me in the video (in real life this is the last thing any Husky would ever do , but yeah....wishful thinking on my end). The Lyrics are done, I get myself some final coffee and proceed to hit the sheets. DONE.
Also you may find a familiar chair in this video (if you're familiar with my other songs/videos)
How we built it
I really wanted to challenge me with an entirely new Toolset on this, and after Google entered the sponsors I thought this is an ideal opportunity for me, as I just started playing around Googles AI studio and Flow. So i tried to basically only use google tools and models in the making of this Music Video. It was quite a learning curve to see what Nano Banana can and cannot do....especially my Mask is the absolute end boss for any image model, as "Mask" is usually understood with having openings for eyes and a mouth. I have ways to get around that, but the dialog prompting in AI Studio was at times very challenging to me. Same goes to the use of Flow. I'm used to Open AIs Sora1 and it's own version of storyboards, so getting used to Flow's version took me a moment as Flow operates on image input and not clips, which makes the flow of a scene quite difficult. And with credits being an issue again, i couldn't just brute force video material like with Sora. Here I had to carefully plan ahead and layout my storyboard for each of the shots ahead . I only had a limited amount of credits as well, but since i started the project rather early i had a credit reset i could benefit from. to still make this work I had to use the veo3.0 fast version and later the 3.1 fast version for the majority of the time. This however gave me ample opportunities to generate enough footage for the final edit.
The Song I was roughly working on since around early, mid-summer. But completed in Suno was much later around October. It was actually one of the first songs I also was able to edit with the new Suno Studio. So this project was a learning opportunity on all fronts to be honest.
Editing was done in Davinci Resolve Studio Version.
Challenges we ran into
Couple actually. First challenge : was getting the my character to interact with the fridge in a proper way. But as i was limited in credits at one point i had to use what i had. Second challenge : while animating my mask is a challenge i usually find ways to offset the randomness of generations. veo3.0 actually worked quit nice in getting me scenes and footage. When 3.1 dropped i was very much looking forward to improved result only to notice that all my efforts i developed during the early days of the project with veo3 stopped working. Like even on image references veo3.1 does not like featureless smooth masks that do not look like normal "masks". so a lot of footage and credits got lost with faulty generations. I had in some cases to resort to getting some clips from SAGA, which still use veo3.0 for their video generation and i luckily had some credit through chroma i could use here. That doesn't mean i didn't get veo 3.1. eventual to work somewhat but "oh boy" that updated model sure hats masked characters. third challenge: Google AI Studio is a great set of tools how to engage with AI models and especially nano banana. However i had quite a few times trouble to generate sometimes. My most common and frustrating experience is having Google AI Studio getting stuck in a loop, showing the same picture over and over again no matter the user input. Everything got eventually resolved, but as i said. It's a learning curve to get familiar with any new models and their capabilities.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This entire Video is something I'm incredibly proud of. It marked my first time using new tools after being stuck with the same process for the better of this year. I think the final result speak for itself....i am proud of the song and I'm especially proud of the ideas and their execution i got from working with the google toolsets
What we learned
We learned that the gap between a "cool AI shot" and "AI filmmaking" is 100% about narrative control. A collage of pretty images isn't a story. The leap from Veo 3.0 to 3.1 proved that not every time a new model hit's it's an instant win. But i learned that firstframe-lastframe is a very important feature these days. Also being tool-agnostic is a massive advantage. so, hopping from my comfort zone into a new platform, while painful, forced me to find new solutions to old problems.
What's next for Procrasti Nation
"Procrasti-Nation" is officially out in the world, doing its thing on YouTube and social media. Its primary job now is to find its people and serve as the official soundtrack for their next 3 AM existential spiral. As for what's literally next, it's being submitted to the Chroma Awards, mostly to see if the judges have my sense of light humor and are like me a sucker for DOGS. Cheers guys :)
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