Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545302
www.postmagazine.com 22 POST MAY/JUNE 2026 and I found a language through trial and error. I found kind of a description of the language that I put into every prompt. "And then I described the child in exactly the same way, every time, as well. What I found is that the order you write stuff in matters. So you want to kind of front load it with what's really important. You might get different results if you bury some- thing in the middle of the prompt versus at the top. So sometimes the trial and error is like the order of stuff. And then sometimes it's even sort of sen- tence length, because I think it kind of reads the prompt in chunks, so it might lose a little. It might read a chunk, execute, then read another, so some- times just varying your sentence structure can kind of really help. "Veo 3.1, which is what I used, it will give you an :08 clip. So you write your prompt, which is usually a few paragraphs — not an insignificant amount of description — and it'll give you a clip. And based on that :08 clip, you can figure out what it's understanding and what it's misunder- standing about what you're asking...I was figuring out, 'Oh, if I express it like this, the AI isn't really understanding it. It's interpreting what I'm saying this way.' It was about finding language that was not confusing, but was clarifying. Generally, I was finding that it took me about 20 attempts to get a good shot." I was going to ask you how many iterations it takes to get what you are looking for? "I would say 20. Less on a very few occasions. I would get lucky on the first, second, third time, and it would do something unexpected, as happens on-set, where you have to leave a door open. You know what you want, but then on-set, something happens that you didn't anticipate. And that's cool! 'Oh, I haven't thought of it like that. But that's really cool. That's a lucky acci- dent. I like that better than what I was thinking.' It's very much an iterative process and it's kind of tweaking and tweaking until it's closer and closer. And then it becomes a case of diminishing re- turns, because if you put too much detail into the prompt, it starts to confuse it, honestly." As it goes on, does it get easier? Are you then copying and pasting what has worked for your next prompt? "Yes. In terms of the environment, in terms of like the look, in order to get the consistency of the environment and the consistency of the character, you have to put the exact wording in. If you mix up the wording, like if I described the boy differently in one prompt versus another, I would get a differ- ent-looking boy. Things are evolving so rapidly that I worry that anything I say might be out of date. But at that point, I wasn't using a reference image for the boy. The consistency I got with the boy isn't perfect. To me, I can see the differences, shot by shot, but I've shown it to people, and said, 'Does this look like the same kid to you, shot to shot?' And they're like, 'Yeah.' But it really isn't." Did you use a photo of David to generate a younger version for the boy? "I did not…I spoke to David and I was like, 'Are you okay with not actually being in this video? I have an idea, which I thought we could put you in as a sort of cameo on a billboard and on a flyer.' Stuff like that. And he was like, 'That's cool.' So I used a current picture of David as an adult, and put that into the billboard, the flyer on a lamppost and then a flyer on the roadside. It appears three times be- cause I always like three as a kind of thing." There are quite a few human characters in there. Were they based on real people? "The only other character that is based on a real person is (the grandmother). I showed it to David. I said, 'Do you have any notes? He said, 'Well, I've one note.' The grandmother character that I had originally. The woman that I had sort of crafted as the grandmother was kind of this larger-than-life, flamboyant character with big hair and big shoul- ders — big kind of dress. And he's like, 'You know, that doesn't really remind me of my grandmother. Would you be open to trying with a real picture of my grandma?' And I said, 'I said if you're open to it, I can try, but it might be a bit uncanny valley for you. I'll do my best.' "So he sent me a picture of his grandmother and I reworked that one shot so that it was a like- ness. I wouldn't say an exact likeness, but a like- ness of his grandma in that shot. And I think that really moved him. I think those childhood road trips to Tucumcari, New Mexico, had really moved him as a child, and really stuck in his memory and really felt like seminal kind of life experiences for him. And to be able to kind of pay tribute to his grandmother in that one small way felt really meaningful to him." Are you keeping the aspect ratio in mind at this point, or is that determined later in the edit? "I did that in post. What I find is, the aspect ratio, you can't really control that. You can ask for a certain aspect ratio, and it won't necessarily always give it to you. It's not necessarily obedient. So sometimes you'll get a perfect shot, but it'll give you the wrong aspect ratio. So what I found was to just focus on getting the shot that you want and then deal with the aspect ratio yourself afterwards in post. Because it's desert, because it is landscape and it's epic, it felt right to sort of do it the way I did it…with the bars that I put in." What else did you do in terms of affecting the image? "The other stuff I did was, I added a grain layer, and then I softened the image quite a bit, because I think the sharpness is an AI giveaway, so I just add- ed a blur effect…to give it a softness. I did a sort of uniform color pass on everything to kind of make it Specific prompts helped refine the Southwest landscape. Creating a consistent look for the young boy was just one of the challenges.