When Inspiration Strikes at 3 PM

I've made peace with the fact that my creative process looks like controlled chaos from the outside. 100 browser tabs open, two projects near-finished, brain bouncing between concepts like a pinball machine—but honestly? This chaotic good energy is where my best work lives.

Midjourney has become my perfect creative fidget toy. While I'm supposed to be focused on client work, part of my brain is always feeding random cinematic prompts into the machine. "Rain on neon signs." "Liminal hospital spaces." "Figure emerging from fog." It's not procrastination—it's how I keep the creative engine warm while the logical side handles business.

Into the Rabbit Hole

Most of these experiments die quiet deaths in my AI folder. But sometimes the algorithm serves up something that makes me pause mid-scroll and think, "Wait, what story is this trying to tell me?"

That's exactly what happened with this piece. One generated image grabbed my ADHD brain and wouldn't let go. Suddenly I'm in full hyperfocus mode, reverse-engineering a narrative from a single frame. Building out complementary scenes. Developing a visual language I didn't know I was creating. (And yes, I know this is kind of a crap process, and I generally try to be better than this, but for my personal projects…this happens often.

It's interesting to see how much a 46-second clip that emerges from creative fidgeting can sometimes feel more cohesive than projects I've spent more time planning. Sometimes my scattered attention makes connections that linear thinking would miss. My brain works in fragments and tangents, and AI tools finally give me a medium that can keep up.