A news film in one evening, and the three drafts it took

Blog post #91

Three storyboard drafts beside a laptop and microphone for a robotics news film.

AI-generated illustration.

On 7 October Elon Musk posted that Grok Bot would use the best model for each task, naming Claude Opus 5.5, Midjourney and Suno. I made a film about it the same evening. The film took four drafts. The first one was not good.

🎥 Prefer video? Watch the Grok Bot film on YouTube.

What changed since last log

  • After the Nobel films I wanted to see if the same pipeline works for a fast news topic: research, script, voice, scenes built by parallel agents, render, upload.
  • I also tried writing in my own first-person voice, with opinions, instead of a neutral lecture.

What shipped

  • A 4:29 film: what Musk announced, how Grok Bot works, how it compares to Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots.
  • A real cut-out of the post itself, the real Grok Bot app, Muse’s and Dots’ own artwork, a Starship photo (CC BY, credited) and a small rocket scene with the Grok Bot lifting off.

What’s working

  • Real material beats drawn material. My first draft had painted quote cards and logos. The second used real screenshots and the products’ own characters. Grok Bot’s avatars turned out to be inline SVG on x.ai, so I pulled the actual vector shapes out of the page and rendered them crisp.
  • Patching with agents. Four parallel agents each owned two or three scenes. I wrote my review notes at the bottom of one scene file as “v2 changes”, “v3 changes”, and they patched their scenes instead of starting over.
  • Glass cards. Transparent glass for sources and cards, over soft real backgrounds, looked much better than white boxes.

What’s unclear or broken

  • The bots don’t blink or move their eyes like on the real site. The SVGs can do it. I didn’t build it.
  • I never got the Dots product video, only stills, and the Muse screenshot is mostly white inside its glass frame.
  • I have not tried Grok Bot myself yet. The film says so.

Decisions made

  • No stacked disclaimers. If a company says something, the film says “Meta says” and moves on.
  • Don’t repeat other people’s reactions from X. Only the post that started it is shown.
  • Few words on screen, symbols where possible, in case the film is dubbed later.
  • Use purple much less. I had overdone it.
  • Keep the playful extras. The rocket scene was the one thing I loved, so the next film gets more of that.

Tooling & process

  • A fact check caught two things I had wrong: Grok Bot’s launch page says each bot has its own computer, but the docs say all your bots share one. And Midjourney has no official public API, which makes the “Midjourney inside Grok Bot” part an open question.
  • Both Cursor Pro ($20) and SuperGrok ($30) include Grok Bot access, according to their own pricing pages.
  • Voice: ElevenLabs v4 with my clone. Scenes: HyperFrames. Real material: grabbed with the browser, credited in a glass pill on screen.

— Stefan