ZOMBIE WEATHER
Client: Self-initiated
Project: Zombie Weather
Role: Creative Director + Systems Designer
Production: Brainclub 5000
Deliverables: Automated two-minute data-to-video film
Timeline: Ongoing R&D
What happens when you feed a video model live data instead of a script.
If it worked, the AI models would stop being a fancier render engine and start being something else: a way of turning whatever's happening in the world into a film, as it happens.
It needed a test, and I wanted the dullest data I could find. Weather forecasts. I pulled them from a public API and built a prompting layer that takes the numbers, the rain percentages, the wind speeds, the hour-by-hour temperatures, and rewrites them as scenes. The output is a two-minute weather report for any location on Earth. Presented by zombies, for zombies.
The zombies weren't decoration. They were a stress test for Veo 3. Anyone can get a model to make something look undead. I wanted to know if it could hold a character across a whole report: the way a zombie would care about a cold front, what a zombie thinks about as a sunny weekend, whether you could get a sense of zombie society from how it reads the forecast. Surface is easy. Behaviour is hard.
It worked better than I expected. Not flawlessly, but enough to prove the loop is real. A number from an API becomes a line of dialogue. A change in the forecast becomes a change in mood. The report for Reykjavik is a different film from the report for Lagos, and nobody wrote either of them.
That's the part I keep coming back to. Film has always started with a script. This starts with a feed. Point it at anything that updates, sport, markets, traffic, your own calendar, and you get stories that didn't exist until the moment you asked for them.
If it worked, the AI models would stop being a fancier render engine and start being something else: a way of turning whatever's happening in the world into a film, as it happens.
It needed a test, and I wanted the dullest data I could find. Weather forecasts. I pulled them from a public API and built a prompting layer that takes the numbers, the rain percentages, the wind speeds, the hour-by-hour temperatures, and rewrites them as scenes. The output is a two-minute weather report for any location on Earth. Presented by zombies, for zombies.
The zombies weren't decoration. They were a stress test for Veo 3. Anyone can get a model to make something look undead. I wanted to know if it could hold a character across a whole report: the way a zombie would care about a cold front, what a zombie thinks about as a sunny weekend, whether you could get a sense of zombie society from how it reads the forecast. Surface is easy. Behaviour is hard.
It worked better than I expected. Not flawlessly, but enough to prove the loop is real. A number from an API becomes a line of dialogue. A change in the forecast becomes a change in mood. The report for Reykjavik is a different film from the report for Lagos, and nobody wrote either of them.
That's the part I keep coming back to. Film has always started with a script. This starts with a feed. Point it at anything that updates, sport, markets, traffic, your own calendar, and you get stories that didn't exist until the moment you asked for them.