Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545302
www.postmagazine.com 21 POST MAY/JUNE 2026 F ilmmaker Sabrina Doyle has been experimenting with AI for about a year after seeing the work a friend created using the technology and rec- ognizing the opportunities it may offer in terms of previs, world building and enhancing her own sizzle reels. She had an opportunity to further ex- plore its possibilities via a collaboration with singer/ songwriter/guitarist David Haerle, with whom she's partnered in the past. The pair would connect when both were in Los Angeles, but now she's splitting her time in London, and was there when the musi- cian offered her the chance to create accompanying visuals for one of his latest songs. The result is a music video for "Tucumcari Tonite!" — a song that Haerle was inspired to write based on formative experiences that have stayed with him over the years, including long summer drives through the American Southwest. Doyle spent a little over a month producing the piece, us- ing AI tools to create the desert landscape and the dinosaur-themed roadside attractions that Haerle may have come across. The project didn't call on a production designer, cinematographer or team of visual effects artists. In fact, even the on-screen talent — a young boy who resemble Haerle, and his beloved grandmother — were created using AI. The video, with its desert monuments, meteor strike, dinosaur characters and roadside attractions could have run up quite a tab, but Doyle pulled it all off for a few hundred dollars — not including her fee as creative director and editor. Here, she shares her experience working on Tucumcari Tonite!, the power of Google's Veo 3.1 and her thoughts about the future of traditional production. How did you come to work on this project? "David Haerle is an LA-based musician. I'm be- tween LA and London, (and) had collaborated with David in the past on other music videos, but was in was in London in the fall of last year and was obviously sort of remote at that point. We were thinking about what we could do together…and I had started experimenting with AI as a tool for my features to kind of previs and create sizzle reels to persuade investors (and) give them a sense of tone. Sort of a 'look book,' but enhanced. You're giving them a sort of teaser trailer, even before they've started. "What we're seeing is that people want more and more fleshed out detail. A script is not enough anymore. I had sort of experimented with AI to create a sizzle reel for a screenplay of mine called Aster's Rites, which is a science-fic- tion screenplay set in a future world. A filmmak- er friend of mine used AI to do a sizzle for his screenplay and my jaw was on the ground. This was about a year ago. He was sort of right at the forefront. I couldn't believe what I was seeing! I was like, 'What did you use? How did you do this?' I had so many questions for him and I decided to sort of experiment with it myself, and was able to cut together a teaser trailer for my screenplay, Aster's Rites. That really captured something. (It) actually felt emotional. I think that's the key, right? There's obviously a lot that's scary, and a lot that is disempowering for us as filmmakers in this process that we have to kind of navigate very carefully. There is nothing like working with a real actor. And this is where editing comes in — just knowing how you want to cut two images together and knowing that two images together create this meaning is very powerful. I don't think the AI can do that. I think only the human can do that. "I was able, with the sizzle for my feature, to cre- ate a world and show that I could create a world and sustain a tone. Something that I would never have been able to achieve without millions of dol- lars, (in) a week-and-a-half of my own time and a subscription to Veo 3.1. That was astonishing to me. So I pitched the idea to David. He sent me a selec- tion of his songs and said, 'Which one speaks to you for this kind of video?' And I was like, 'Well, this one does because it feels like it's not something that we would shoot for real. It feels like something that we could only do with visual effects, or AI, or something like that.' "He had other ideas, and I was like, 'No, just go out and shoot that with a real camera, real actors, real people.' I don't think it should be a substitute for doing something for real if you can do things for real. But if you can create something that would otherwise never have been made in the real world, and AI gives you the means to do that, either in terms of scale or budget, then that becomes a viable case to make for using AI as a tool. It was about this kind of ancient land, where dinosaurs roamed, and also his childhood. It felt like (it) had a mythic kind of quality about it, almost like a halluci- nation, a dream." The consistency from shot to shot is very impressive. Can you talk about the prompts that you wrote. Did you have any help? "I did everything, so it was a complete one-man band — or one-woman band. (I) did the prompt- ing. I cut it together. I did everything. The art is all in the prompting. And generally, the way it works is, you find with trial and error. For exam- ple, I was finding that I (was) prompting about a desert landscape, and it was giving me very traditional cactuses, which you don't find in that bit of the world. So, I had to very specifically talk about the vegetation that I wanted — juniper — Google's Veo 3.1 served as the main video-generation tool.