Originally published as an Advisory Hour Substack post on 2026-08-23. This first-party site copy preserves the text, localizes public supporting media, and connects the record to its project trail.
Original post
One benefit of local video generation is the wider range of concept exploration. It’s barely an inconvenience to send Hermes out to bring back new SR-71 like videos, with some unique twists. Not that every twist is a winner, but it’s still fun to see the range.
This next clip is so crazy that I’m not even sure what the agent harness was thinking. Perhaps something like “Let’s try this completely unexpected style”. The clip feels both wrong and less than innocent to know that this is a stealth bomber bringing the “good news”. I can’t quite make out the insignia on the side of the plane. The entire thing is pretty incredible. If your stealth bomber arrives on a rainbow, then you’ve got something else going on.
Of the batch, this idea was the most interesting to me. It’s a stealth like plane flying fast thru a neon lit city. It’s an idea that I need to put more time into exploring. So a little less “rainbow and smiles” and a little more exploration of this front.
Comparisons are good. Here are the contact sheets for both videos if you’d like to work the frames yourself. It’s remarkable just how different the two are to me. One’s quite literally rainbows and sunshine. The other is… dark and brooding. Both paint a particular mood.
I mentioned a few days ago that I’m experimenting with open source music generation. It’s opened a strange new problem: I have so many music tracks. I’m leaning on building a musiclab section on my website. It’d be thematically consistent.
Here are two tracks to show some of the range that’s possible.
We’re entering a weird new world where audio, image, video and more are just one prompt away. It seems likely that things start to consolidate: one prompt to get a fully polished movie or music video. One prompt for a feature length movie, or game series. There just isn’t enough time in the world to explore it all.
Connected work
- Minimax H3 on an NVIDIA 3080: See the local video model and older GPU behind the aircraft experiments.
- SR-71 Upscale Collection: Compare the restored and enlarged Blackbird images that sit beside this concept work.
- Blackbird Recon: Fly the browser project that turned the SR-71 into a playable route.