The problem
I wanted to make an abstract ethical question - what happens once genetic modification has no downside? - feel visceral in a few minutes of trailer, using original characters the audience has zero context for. There wasn't time to explain the world; the trailer itself had to do all the world-building and still land an argument about the cost of "perfection."
What I tried
I designed the crew's characters and key scenes through iterative AI image and video prompting, then built out short sequences in passes (an early scene sequence, a SOMA-based pass, a final-scene pass). To push past what generative tools alone could convincingly produce, I mixed in free stock footage - lab, modified-human, earth, explosion - for scale, and used Eleven Labs for voice-over and sound effects.
What I changed
The first cuts read as either "cool sci-fi trailer" or "grim war footage" but never both at once. I reworked the pacing so the calm hubris of the early scenes collides directly with the chaos of the war footage, retimed the final "dancing" sequence so it lands as dark irony instead of celebration, and pulled back on which shots carried literal dialogue versus which stayed purely visual.
Why
The point of the piece was to make editing rhythm itself the argument - that the excitement of "solving" biology and the cost of that power are inseparable. Without narration to spell that out, the only way to say it was through the collision of tone between shots.
Beyond that, it's meant as a quiet awareness piece - I'm not taking any political side, just asking how not-so-crazy a future like this really is if the world keeps heading the way it currently is. It's also where my two fields meet: Global Studies gave me the framework to think about power and consequence at a societal scale, and Media Arts gave me the tools to make that scale feel personal and immediate.