Source note: Local copy of a Summer Into AI 2026 submission originally published on Substack. Screenshots, video, and audio found in the post body are mirrored locally when publicly accessible; profile and avatar images are intentionally not copied. Read the canonical post.
After pushing on Blender and video, I got to thinking… what if I made a music video?
Here’s the image that was speaking to me. I looked at this image and it began to speak. It said many things. The image was saying, “Eric, you need to make a music video.” And I nodded. I scratched my chin and responded, “Yes, yes I do.”
So, I did. And it’s amazing. Turn up your sound system and click play.
Is it visually perfect in every scene? Of course not-it’s AI. And besides, I did this on a budget. There’s a secret in all the AI art we see bubbling about. Today’s AI blemishes and faults will be tomorrow’s art. Enjoy the spectacle of it, at mach 3 volume.
These art issues will be intentionally designed for in a few years. It’s the same reason the VHS effect in Adobe’s After Effects comes in three different flavors in their effect panel library. The weird blobs and creations will be looked at as art of a bygone era.
The storyboard-or shall I call it storybird?
You can see the issues in the storyboard that probably caught your eye watching the video. I’m quite OK with these flaws. My budget for this experiment is exhausted. Really-what a fun ride! The road to a music video didn’t start at all with video or music. Here’s how I got there.
I never intended to make a music video-it wasn’t even on my list. Heck, I didn’t even think to make an SR-71. I just was trying to model in blender.
The story behind the video
The project started out with a question. I wanted to know how far I could push blender with Hermes. How far could agentic AI driving blender really go? The first attempt was not great. In fact, it was terrible-horrible in a way that’s also art. Consider this montage from the gallery.
So, we-hermes and I-iterated and if you’re a subscriber to my substack here then you know I tend to be a relentlessly persistent SOB when I get an idea in my head. Again and again we go, until eventually we’re at a point where I can go “Ah, that’s a nice place there.” Also, “a nice place” might resemble token exhaustion, but that’s just a tidy coincidence.
So you can imagine: the iterations would continue until I could get the modeling to a space where it looked decent. Eventually, we got a solution in place and it worked well enough that I began to wonder… what if I made a game about this?
The image above shows the evolution of the process, and not at all the things that are wrong in each scene. However, each scene got one thing right and then I’d pull the slot-machine lever of AI and see what happened next. Eventually it dawned on me: I could use this historic “past” SR-71 model as a competition entry for this week’s “build on the past” theme.
Black Bird Recon
So that’s why Black Bird Recon was built. I wanted to not just use blender-I wanted to take a complex set of objects out of blender and get those into a threejs game.
And really? For one of a couple projects I’m just poking around with, this turned out great. I can’t think of any games that are dedicated SR-71 mission simulators. I feel like that’s a real miss. This had to exist.
Not bad, terrain is potato quality as are the landscape details. However, the model did import. And when you’re flying high the engine burn is active.
If you watched the gameplay video, then you caught the cockpit view at the end. Guilty.
I tend to prefer cockpit views, which meant that if I was going to build an SR-71 flight simulation game that I’d have to include a cockpit view! This was a little tricky to figure out. There’s some really subtle details I wanted included as well. For example, when you’re flying up thru clouds you’ll start seeing condensation lines over the glass. It’s great.
And while the controls are far from perfected- there’s some drift bugs I haven’t teased out. Not to mention a thousand little improvements I’d love to make but am pushing up against the clock, you can fly up to outer atmosphere.
SR-71 in Movies
I had too much fun this with this build.
If this were a vinyl album (and now I’m giving some real thought to getting a vinyl made of this), here’s one of the album covers. You’ll find these images in the sr71 game, too. The game isn’t nearly as cool as everything around the game.
As is, the music video needed a storyboard. So what I did was to use my game background screen art, combined that with the blender footage for pose and reference, and then assembled all of that into the music video at the very start of this post. This art is glorious.
The contact sheet from the blender footage I include here because I find it a good example of where I’m at today with using AI to drive Blender. I couldn’t even tell you how many weeks or months it’d have taken me to model this by hand. In the best of cases, if I have the full geometry of a target in my head… I can generally whip around blender pretty fast. I cannot move AI fast. I’m not sure anyone can.
Those shots aren’t perfect-there’s a ton of details that need refined. It reminds me of the same problems of AI writing code. The big picture is good, but those little details at the edge? So much work.
How I solved editorial edits
There trick to aligning the edits in the video is something I learned from many years of dorking around with After Effects. You need a beatmapping solution. With that, you can algorithmically slice the edges and get the edits placed into the compositions where you need to. This works reasonable well on an automated basis that a first pass of just having the algorithm handle where and when to place edits and content works great. And in an AI world, you can also use that to drive what kind of footage that maybe you want to drop in.
Oh, and if you’re wondering what sent me down the rabbit hole of doing the SR-71 in the first place? It was exploring engines in blender with AI.
And the thought of a music video hit me while doing the 1776 documentary.
The Music
If you’d like to re-mix the song or play it live, let me know. I’ve played this song so much that the music has burned itself into my brain. The tool: Suno v5.5. If you’d like to listen to the music again, I’ve uploaded it here for you to download and add to your playlists for SR-71 music.
I hear Adam may release a vinyl sound software project he’s working on. If that drops out in public, I’ll definitely be tinkering with it with the music track. Maybe I will get a vinyl player after all.
Lyrics
Black Budget Bird by Eric Rhea
[Instrumental Intro]
[Analog radar pulse]
[Low distorted bass]
[Hangar ambience]
[Static]
[Spoken Word, close mic, conspiratorial]
They said it wasn’t there.
They said it couldn’t fly.
They said if you saw it,
you didn’t.
[Post-Punk Groove Enters]
[Mission-control percussion]
[Distorted guitar stabs]
[Verse 1]
Red light blinking in a windowless room,
black tape over a government moon,
fuel so cold it bites the bone,
runway shaking like a rotary phone.
Men in suits with the curtains drawn,
maps lit up till the morning yawned,
somewhere past where the weather dies,
there’s a needle threading enemy skies.
[Pre-Chorus]
No name on the flight plan.
No flag on the flame.
No photograph sharp enough
to prove what came.
[Chorus]
Black budget bird,
burning holes in the night.
Black budget bird,
gone before the fight.
Too fast for the sirens,
too high for the guns,
too black for the papers,
too real to outrun.
Black budget bird,
kick the sky till it cracks.
Black budget bird,
and it never looks back.
[Instrumental Break]
[Afterburner swell]
[Radar sweep]
[Guitar feedback, short and sharp]
[Verse 2]
Tin-star generals with coffee-stained hands,
watching ghosts on classified scans,
missile crews with a perfect lock,
then nothing but a laughing clock.
Chrome don’t shine where this thing goes,
black paint drinks what the daylight knows,
nineteen sixties paranoia machine,
beautiful, illegal, mean.
[Pre-Chorus]
No parade for the pilots.
No hymn for the crew.
Just pressure suits, burn marks,
and a sky cut through.
[Chorus]
Black budget bird,
burning holes in the night.
Black budget bird,
gone before the fight.
Too fast for the sirens,
too high for the guns,
too black for the papers,
too real to outrun.
Black budget bird,
kick the sky till it cracks.
Black budget bird,
and it never looks back.
[Bridge]
[Percussion drops]
[Cold synth pulse]
[Spy-film brass]
[Spoken Word, tense]
At eighty thousand feet,
the world is just a file.
Redacted coastlines.
Static for miles.
If they ask what you saw,
you saw weather.
If they ask what you heard,
you heard nothing.
If they ask what burned across the sun—
[Build-Up]
[Drums return]
[Brass rising]
[Afterburner roar texture]
You say:
the sky had a secret,
and the secret had wings.
[Final Chorus]
[Full cinematic spy-punk propulsion]
Black budget bird,
burning holes in the night.
Black budget bird,
gone before the fight.
Too fast for the sirens,
too high for the guns,
too black for the papers,
too real to outrun.
Black budget bird,
kick the sky till it cracks.
Black budget bird,
and it never looks back.
[Outro]
[Driving bass continues]
[Radio static]
[Distorted guitar fades]
[Spoken Word, distant]
Mach three.
No witnesses.
No apology.
[End]
Play the game here on the gamelab at https://www.ericrhea.com/gameslab/
Would advise desktop-pretty sure the control scheme won’t map to mobile well. It was barely tested on mobile. I was focused on the music video over mobile. :)
What’s next?
What’s next aside from me listening to the song on repeat? Well, great question.
I definitely want to do another pass on this with the next generation of video models, tightening up the display and resolving some of the state issues. I’ve solved some of this in John’s World but not in a great way. I have a hunch the next generation of video models, following the bitter lesson, will simply solve these morphology challenges.
Direct link to game: https://www.ericrhea.com/gamelab/projects/sr71/index.html
Original source
Canonical Substack URL: https://advisoryhour.substack.com/p/summer-into-ai-eric-week4-submission.