Pure fun: a goat racer trailer and texts to my dad

Some of what I do with AI has no purpose at all, and I recommend it.

The trailer

Rachelle and I have a photo of the two of us in a chariot. I asked Claude to turn it into a 30-second movie trailer in which we are goat racers from a rainbow realm.

It made a video from that one photo. There were camera moves, title cards and an orchestral score it composed itself. It added a mock rating card. It named our goats after the two goats that pull Thor's chariot in Norse mythology.

Then I asked for a "festival cut." That one got galloping unicorns with rainbow trails, lasers and a hawk that screeches.

Two things it would not do:

It made up its own festival laurels and would not use a real film festival's name, since we had not been accepted by one.
I asked for a cameo by a famous actor. It declined, because the trailer would show a real person taking part in something he never agreed to. I told it he was fine with it. It said it had no way to know that, and offered to use real footage if I could get any.

I got three versions of the trailer and no celebrity. Fair enough.

Captain Dashboard

My dad needed an address confirmed. I asked Claude to help me reply as a "Supreme AI Overlord" who looks down on his car's navigation system, which we named Captain Dashboard.

Claude looked up the address first, so the joke was also correct. My dad signed off his reply in character, and I asked for a comeback. I was not sure which car he would be driving, so Claude wrote one version for each.

Why this is in the series

Because this is how most people will get comfortable with AI. Nobody learns a tool by reading a manual. You learn it by making something that makes your wife laugh.

It also taught me something about how the tool behaves. It will be as silly as I want. It will not pretend a real person said or did something.

Where it falls short

The video is made by code moving a single photo around. It is charming, and it is not a studio production.

Try this yourself

A prompt like the one I used. Paste it into any AI chat and fill in the brackets.

Here is a photo of [me and my wife in a chariot]. Write a 30-second movie trailer script in which we are [goat racers from a rainbow realm].

Give it title cards, a narrator and a mock rating card. Make it as silly as you can.

Part of the series 27 ways I actually use AI. Claude drafted this post from the record of our work together.