The Transformation of Reggie O’Brien

The Recipe

First, the idea came from generating an image of "photorealistic cthulu-like being bartending. he has a suit and tie on. everyone else in the bar is a normal human being. candid flash photography."

This was the first batch of images.

I kept re-running the prompt until I came upon this one with sunglasses and just an overall chill and deadpan vibe.

There, Reggie was born. An incredible character, one that I already had a billion ideas for once I saw him. 

I then fed this image into Claude to get a name for the guy and maybe some background about him.

I kept brainstorming like this with Claude until I ran out of tokens and then switched to Gemini. After getting a general sense for what I wanted, I had Gemini craft me a bit of story that I would end up using as deadpan narration. 

From there, once the story was done, the hard part was over.

I then immediately wanted to see how this felt and I entered the story we had created together into ElevenLabs and I chose a voice that I liked that didn’t sound too cheesy or robotic. I landed on the voice “Matt Snowden”. Once hearing the story out loud, I immediately downloaded it and made a timeline on DaVinci Resolve 19 and I was ready!

Then I started just prompting and generating images on Midjourney like crazy to fit the story that I had already put down as a base for what I was doing.

Let’s just say I spent a whole lot of time here…

From there, I would put these into Runway Gen-3 Alpha and start generating videos! Those would also be hit or miss. When I got to the destruction bits, I watched videos on Kling.AI (I had used this before in its infancy, but hadn’t used it since). They had a sale going on for their highest tier, so I thought I would give it a shot, and it did destruction a LOT better than Runway. So I used that for the destructive bits. For other images that didn’t work well on Midjourney, I used Flux. In particular, this was most anything with a keyboard or a mouse. Or anything else that was just mathematical.

I then essentially laid out a big timeline filled with generated video over the narration. This took a few days to get here, maybe 3-4.

I then did a dive into Artlist.io to find some suitable music that would work well. That’s where I found the pieces in the film. There was also a bit where the destruction was happening that I didn’t have anything for, so I entered the last 5 seconds of the horror track into Udio to generate a smoothly transitioning choir chorus. It was perfect!

From there, it was time to do the SFX and I knew ElevenLabs had recently opened up their SFX generation, so I used that for everything. However, I knew I would have to pick and choose where I put the sound effects as I know how cheesy it sounds just to put on everything; you have to pick and choose your moments where you want to point something specific out.

From there, I was essentially finished! Just generated this “mascot” I liked for the end that might fit the voice of Matt Snowden in case I wanted to continue this in a sort of, “Twilight Zone”-esque series in the future. Place my credits and that was that!

This took about 50-60hrs of work and it's something I'm incredibly proud of. Reggie has now been unleashed upon the world and I couldn't be happier at how people are sincerely relating to him, something I could never have imagined at the outset.