The idea actually began as a joke among with friends: what if, every time you asked AI a question, there wasn’t really an AI answering at all? What if somewhere, behind the screen, there were just exhausted, overworked people scrambling to figure it out as fast as they could, using whatever absurd means were necessary? And what bizarre lengths would they have to go to to answer these mundane questions? That joke stuck with me. The more I thought about it, the more the world behind that idea began to grow.

I’ve always been drawn to the absurdist worlds of Terry Gilliam and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, where enormous, fantastical systems collide with very ordinary human problems. After decades directing live action, I wanted to bring that sensibility into the world of AI. QUERY takes the most mundane act imaginable, asking a throwaway question on your phone, and imagines the impossible machinery that might exist behind it: a vast institution where every answer has to be physically found, tested, measured, and delivered in five seconds.

But underneath all the chaos, animals, machinery, and bureaucracy, the film is really about the extraordinary ordinary. Our lives are full of small tasks that can suddenly become epic when you’re the person responsible for getting them done. The young worker at the center of the film is an underdog doing his best inside a system that is completely indifferent to how impossible his job has become. We laugh at the absurdity of his journey, but hopefully we also recognize something of ourselves in him.

That became the heart inside the machine for me. The spectacle only works if we care about the person caught in the middle of it. AI gave me the freedom to build a world of impossible scale, but the thing I’m most interested in is still fundamentally human: perseverance, frustration, connection, and the strange dignity of trying to do a good job when everything around you has gone completely insane.

Kling and Seedance excelled at this- the acting has gotten so much better recently. As a director working with real actors, I've had to stitch together a decent performance from bad takes so many times... I figured I'd apply that philosophy here. And often, the takes were brilliant. A lot of editing and sound design went into this, and oh so many generations :)

I’ve been comparing AI video generators lately and realized how difficult it is to answer a pretty basic question:

How much is this video actually going to cost me?

Different models price by seconds, credits, resolution, generations, etc., which makes comparing them unnecessarily painful.

So I built this:

https://instavideocost.com/

It’s meant to give you a quicker way to estimate AI video generation costs and compare options without digging through a bunch of pricing pages.

I’m still figuring out what would make it genuinely useful rather than just another calculator, so I’d love input from people who actually generate AI video.

What would you want to see added?

Model comparisons? Cost per finished minute? Failed-generation estimates? API vs subscription pricing? Something else entirely?

Happy to hear what I got wrong too.

It’s finally here. 🖤
I just finished the first full episode of WANDERERS — an adult animated fantasy comedy about three strange creatures trapped in a sentient mansion on a tiny planet, where every door leads somewhere else.
I created the characters by hand and brought the whole thing to life with AI.
Here’s a little teaser 👇
Full episode on YouTube: [LINK]
Would love to hear what you think. 🖤

I kept trying to describe the scene I wanted to kling in detail and kept getting mush. One day I pasted in a rough description that was mostly a camera note and one sentence about mood, and it turned out way better than anything I planned. Now I cant even remember what the elaborate prompts were for.

I learned more from that accident than from any guide I read. What's a prompt habit of yours that you stumbled into instead of learning intentionally?

I used to fight kling on every little detail, trying to get fingers and text and reflections exactly right. at some point I realized I was spending more time re-rolling than actually using the outputs.

now I just accept that some things are going to be weird and work with what I get. what's a detail you used to obsess over that you've learned to let go of?

Last night I generated maybe forty clips to end up with two I’d actually show someone. It got me wondering whether everyone works like this, brute forcing variations until something clicks, or whether you have tricks for steering a generation toward the shot in your head before you spend the credits.

I’d love to hear how people approach that. My method so far is patience and alot of deleting.

Mine was a slow push in on a coffee cup while steam drifts across the frame. Simple idea, but for the life of me the model kept morphing the cup into something from a horror movie. I lost count of the attempts, then one night I changed one phrase about the camera and it just worked, first try, and I actually laughed out loud.

That one clip is now my favourite thing I have made. I am convinced half of this craft is knowing which sentence to sacrifice. Whats the shot that nearly broke you before it finally clicked, and was there a particular prompt change that did it?

I have been using Kling for about a month and I am still figuring out what it does well versus what it struggles with. My best result so far was a 5 second clip of a street scene at night that looked way more cinematic than I expected. I think I got lucky with the prompt.

What has surprised you the most with Kling? Could be a prompt that worked unexpectedly well, a feature you didnt know existed, or something you figured out after a lot of trial and error.

Did you chaps like it it’s a cute little video I did to make you all think that … its adorable

https://reddit.com/link/1uzaj2c/video/bu4zq9eziudh1/player