Making "This Christmas Eve": My Take on a Holiday Tune
What Got Me Started I've always wanted to write a solid Christmas song—one that hits on love and that tough feeling of missing someone during the holidays. In November 2024, I made it happen with "This Christmas Eve." It's about those quiet moments, like an empty chair at dinner but still finding some peace under the stars. My family inspired it—holidays with my wife and our little white Maltese, Sheeba. I mixed AI tools with my own heart to bring it to life. I decided to bring the song to life using my creative talent and the power of some of the latest AI tools.
What I Picked Up AI speeds things up a ton, like taking what's in my head and creating a storyboard of amazing images, but it needs my real-life tweaks to feel personal. Slipping in stuff like my own lyrics and then adding my wife, myself, and our cute little dog Sheeba into some of the scenes. Mostly, I learned passion and the human soul are what make it special—without that, it's just tech.Let's be honest: AI is just a tool, but without human input or that initial "idea," it falls flat.
How I Put It Together Kicked off mid-October using the song I created in 2024, along with which I wrote the lyrics: featuring couples that are in different cities or countries during Christmas and they are missing each other. They send text messages and take selfies to connect and feel the love. The song was a little tricky; I had to spend a lot of time tweaking to get the right sound. I was chasing that Christmas feel and something you can sing along to.
I used AI to try styles, genres, and instruments and tweaked the voice; it took a bit, but I nailed one that fit the words.For a music video, you have to interpret the music and paint a picture in your mind and then use text-to-image. I used Freepik's SeeDream 4 4K—great for realistic stuff, and I could feed in up to eight references for steady characters. Added pics of me, my wife, and Sheeba into snowy walks and lit-up homes. Then Grok/Imagine's image-to-video tool animated it all. I'm really impressed—the details, realistic shadows, reflections, and it did an amazing job of bringing my little dog Sheeba to life, creating a beautiful scene where a stuffed toy reindeer came to life and they both hugged.
I was even able to create a video of Sheeba with four little ice skates on her paws, ice skating with Santa!Pieced it in editing software: included diverse couples in various scenes, beautiful snow-covered landscapes, snow falling, Santa and his reindeer. Very happy with the finished project.
The Tough Parts Audio was fiddly—early tries were too upbeat for the missing-you vibe; fixed it with a lot of tweaks and trial and error, and some EQ tweaks late at night. References in images also took a little time—a few retries—but all in all, I was pretty happy.
To be honest, the key is having a vision in your head and then taking that and interpreting the song lyrics. You have to be impeccable with the timing of scenes in the editing software as a new line in the verse commences and bring emotions into the picture. However, once you have all of these vital elements and combine the human mind with the powerful AI tools, the possibilities are endless.
Built With
- freepik
- grok
- imagine
- seedream
