EP X: The Wheel of Fortune
The Good, The Bad and the Beautiful: My maiden voyage with Midjourney
CONCEPT
While most of the writing is improvisational by nature - I’ve developed a ritual for conceptualizing these before I get started. I grab my copy of Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, smoke a joint on the way to the coffee shop, order an iced latte, and sit down with pen and paper until I’ve got it figured out. I won’t show my age by getting too deep into the magic of writing by hand, but the combo of weed, caffeine and analog writing utensils if you’re stuck with a case of writer’s block.
For this one, my logic was that we’re all just white-knuckling the edge of the wheel, suffering or enjoying whatever it throws at us. Good or bad. But the closer you move to the center, the harder it is to tell the difference. Those labels are just what we slap on outcomes based on whether they favored us or not.
Ups and downs. Gutters and strikes. Easy. Good and bad events in rapid succession only to end up in the same place it started.
I ran home, typed up my outline, and animated the whole sequence to screen in about an hour or two. But the entire video was 30 seconds long. I’d only built half an episode.
So I spent the next few days wandering. Making wrong turns. Chasing bad ideas. Dreaming up things that didn’t work. Eventually the casino and fire sequences clicked, and I stuck a fork in it so I could start on Justice.
THE LOOK
I figured I’d break from Runway and try Midjourney’s new video model. I’d already tried prompting Runway for film grain, VHS glitches, CCTV scan lines and the results were never impressive. Midjourney is on another level when it comes to dialing in film stock, camera model, lens length, lighting, halation, mist, all of it. And when it comes to video, the camera movement might even be up there with Google VEO.
But all that comes at a cost.
Midjourney spits out soft, gooey 720p with no way to upscale. It forgets how to do any of the above if you give it reference photos. Text-to-image yields consistently gorgeous results. But though MJ has a handy reference feature even more dialed in that Runways, it’ll fuck up all the great things I for which I just praised it.
Also, it really loves putting subjects dead center in a flattering portrait. All image models do. If you want someone in the background, walking across frame, or arranged like real people not looking at the camera, you’ve got to get tricky with your prompts, start implementing storyboards - all of which is extra tough with Runway.
You’ll notice the shift around the casino. That’s when I went back to Runway for shots Midjourney couldn’t figure out. I’ll also admit to some downright theft. Some of those shots of the game board are just video clips lifted directly from the 1998 film Run Lola Run. There are no rules here. I do what I want.
THE SOUND
I feel compelled to stipulate every time - this was edited manually in Premiere Pro and even though VEO and Kling offer automatic sound design in their beta versions - I don’t use them. Every diegetic essence was plucked from YouTube, Freesound.org, and Elevenlabs. Every note of music was improvised with VST instruments in Ableton.
THE STRUGGLE
Midjourney unlocks insane aesthetic creativity, but you pay for it.
Some things just don’t work:
Getting a hand to shake and roll a pair of dice? Not happening.
Getting a roulette wheel to spin properly? Nope.
Character jumping from a burning building? That took some serious finessing to get past the safety filters.
THEMES
I thought I’d go heavy on the tarot symbols for this one. The Wheel of Fortune is loaded with them: a sphinx, a trickster demon astrological signs like Aquarius, Scorpio, Taurus, and Leo in the corners, representing the fixed signs. In Strength and The Chariot, Cancer and Leo slipped in naturally.
I was busy leaning into something else. It’s an old parable I’ve heard a few times, and will intentionally butcher with the following:
A guy’s horse runs away. The town’s like “Damn, sorry dude.”
He shrugs. “It’s whatever.”
Next day, the horse comes back with four wild horses.
“Whoa! Jackpot.”
He shrugs. “I guess so.”
Then his son falls off one of the new horses and breaks his arm.
“Damn, so sorry about that!”
He shrugs. “Maybe.”
Next day, the army comes through drafting young men. They skip his son because of the injury.
“Bro, that’s amazing, right?”
He shrugs again. “Maybe so, maybe no.”
This guy gets it. He’s not glued to the outer rim of the wheel, freaking out every time it spins. He’s dead in the center. He’s watching. Not reacting. Good and bad are just phases, and they trade places more often than we realize. What’s lucky today might fuck you up tomorrow. What feels like a loss right now might be the thing that saves you later.
That’s the Wheel. That’s the episode.
REFRENCES:
I’m going to try something new and show my hand here. These images are rarely created from a vacuum. For speed, accuracy and to get a cinematic aesthetic without spending a lot of time perfecting prompts, I rely heavily on reference images - usually from Shot Deck.
