by Chi Essary

“How about this—what if Adam and Eve had a pet cat?” I suggested on a whim.

Josh Logan, the head of strategy and marketing at 10zebra, typed the prompt into 10zebra’s AI video clip generator for professional creative teams. Within minutes, four distinct short video clips appeared. The level of detail was uncanny, ranging from hyper-realistic scenes to a whimsical cartoon version. I was amazed by how quickly my casual suggestion had materialized into vivid moving images. I didn’t realize it, but my journey into this brave new AI world had just begun.

I sat down with the founder of 10zebra, Philip Meier, to delve deeper into this intriguing technology. Based in La Jolla, 10zebra is at the forefront of AI-driven creativity. Refined over several years, Meier’s innovations have pushed the boundaries of what’s possible, allowing users to generate cinematic-quality video clips from simple text prompts. He explained how it transforms the creative process for filmmakers, writers, and creative teams by bringing ideas to life with breathtaking speed. Edits that once took hours or days now happen in minutes.

He showed me an example of its streamlined utility. He had visited an architect’s office earlier that day, snapping quick smartphone photos of an architectural model made of white cardboard for their next project. As they chatted, Meier entered a few prompts into his system, producing a short video clip that showed cars passing by the building, another with a family picnicking in the grassy area. The architects were stunned—their static model had come alive on screen within moments. Meier pointed out typical AI errors, like a car inexplicably moving backward before disappearing. “You can fix those if you choose,” he assured me. (Since writing this article, AI has improved to the point where that doesn’t happen much anymore, which is kinda sad for the funny bone.) Despite the glitches, watching the scene that had suddenly come alive with freshly conjured cars was mesmerizing. But I have to confess, it made me uneasy. It felt as though creativity was being reduced to a series of prompts and algorithms.

As a self-proclaimed technophobe, I needed Meier to break it down for me. He pulled up the storyboard from their last “AI Jam” session, an event 10zebra hosts weekly. During these sessions, a group of AI enthusiasts collaborate remotely to create a music video in just one hour. Yes…one hour!

Meier explained that the music the DJ submitted that week was an amorphous, Skywalker-inspired theme with no distinct details. Given the short time frame, the team had to move fast. “We thought, what do we do with this theme given there are no details? We needed a narrative to get started,” Meier said. The team quickly brainstormed and decided to place Luke Skywalker in a modern setting where he’s frustrated with his corporate job. Does he want to quit? Clone himself with AI to do the work? They fed several of their ideas into the AI storyboard generator.

Meier showed me the images the AI generated from their initial prompts. One particularly striking image depicted Luke’s head, looking out innocently, as it sat on a piece of paper—presumably spit out by the copy machine. His hairstyle and glasses perfectly pinned him as a contemporary middle-aged man. That unexpected visual sparked the team’s enthusiasm. “What?! Okay, let’s start with this one!” Meier recalled. The subsequent clips showed Luke doing office odd-jobs at various ages, sometimes only vaguely resembling the iconic character. I was transfixed by how a few simple words were enough to generate so many rich images in random situations the AI had made up. It felt a little eerie to my tech-challenged sympathies. But I held my breath; after all, the team had to create the narrative for the AI to riff off, right?

Meier explained that learning to be specific with your prompts is crucial. To demonstrate, he threw out a random idea to start a storyboard: “Bavarian King running into mayhem.” I had to stop him there—who just comes up with Bavarian King off the top of their head?! “Being versed in the language becomes a superpower,” he said.

The language he was referring to is known as “prompt engineering” in AI circles, and it’s an art all its own. Boring prompts lead to lackluster results; rich detail and succinct direction are where the magic starts. That’s when I started to see what humans and machines were bringing to the table. “The AI is relying on previous knowledge,” Meier noted. “What’s interesting is it’s usually wrong!” But these errors often spark new ideas, if not a good chuckle. It’s a continuous process of curating the AI’s output—keeping some elements, editing out others. This unbridled creative power to throw out ideas and see them materialize immediately brings out a sense of wonder, Meier explained. You creatively let go, and then—”You’re flying!” he exclaimed.

Meier emphasized that embracing failure is key. He explained that in traditional creative processes, the invested time can make us reluctant to scrap our work, even when we know it isn’t succeeding. With AI, the rapid feedback loop allows for quick iterations, making failure less daunting and more instructive. Nothing is too precious to keep you from bold experimentation, and this dance between human creativity and AI generation opens up entirely new forms of artistic exploration. Meier’s enthusiasm was contagious as he described the joy of diving into AI’s rabbit hole. “You learn the power you DO have,” he said.

For me, the uneasiness subsided when I started viewing AI as just the next tool. The invention of photography did not kill painting; it freed it from documenting the visual world, allowing it to explore new forms of expression such as German Expressionism and Cubism. Although many of us still have reservations, AI is showing itself to be a powerful creative tool, one that by turning failure into a springboard rather than a setback, encourages a kind of creative abandon that can amplify human ingenuity.