I honestly thought this would be a technical exercise. It wasn't. The plan: Vio Lucia, my AI artist, covers "Hurt" in the Johnny Cash version. Not young and glossy, but at 65. White hair, tired hands, a closed museum about her own career inside an old flooded aircraft hangar. Her old drummer Franz, now 70, watches from the gallery and doesn't say a word. Here is how it came together, roughly in order: 1. **Study the original, not copy it.** I had Gemini break down the Romanek video into what actually makes it hit: young vs. old, rotting abundance, a silent witness, a cut that speeds up like a pulse, and an ending that is a sound, not a chord. We kept the mechanics and invented new images. 2. **Age the characters first.** Before any scene existed, I built Vio at 65 and Franz at 70 as outfit and detail sheets, and trained a small character ID for old Vio. Otherwise every shot ages her differently. 3. **Moodboard in one film look.** 16 storyboard frames, 4 variants each, all in the same muted, cold film style. That became the start frame for every video clip. 4. **Cut on the breath.** I measured the pauses in the vocal track and put every clip boundary into a breath. That one rule made the lip sync editing painless later. 5. **Video in pieces.** 480p clips, silent, 5 to 18 seconds each. Singing takes got a near-closed mouth in the prompt, then a proper lip sync pass in parts of max 15 seconds, stitched back together frame-exact. 6. **The piano problem.** Vio's hands just rested on the keys, she wasn't really playing. We reframed the wide piano shots so the hands leave the frame, and generated three close-ups where the hands really press the keys: inside the open piano, low across the keys, from above with dust. Cut into the breath pauses, you believe she plays. 7. **Edit, grade, sound, mostly by script.** The whole timeline in DaVinci Resolve was built through its scripting API: placement, crossfades, a look per scene (warm-red at the piano, neutral for Vio's scenes, blue for Franz, cold for the empty places), then fine-tuned by hand. On top: about 30 very quiet ambient sounds made with ElevenLabs. Rain on the roof, water around her boots, a film projector, a candle going out, and at the very end the cockpit canopy closing. You barely hear them, but you'd miss them.