For years I’ve had this story in the back of my mind that I’ve always wanted to tell, but I never really sat down and took the time to flesh it out.
Fast forward nearly 20 years, and it’s still the same world, the same characters, and the same story that’s been playing in my head during long drives, random daydreams, and quiet moments. Some ideas come and go. This one never did. Every few months I’d find myself thinking about another kingdom, another character, or another piece of lore. I don’t know exactly what sparked it this year, but something finally clicked. I had this overwhelming drive to bring it to life, and AI became a huge part of making that possible.
One thing I want to make clear is this story existed long before ChatGPT existed. AI didn’t create Tales of Encenia. The characters, kingdoms, lore, and overarching story have been living in my head for nearly two decades. AI simply gave me a new way to develop, refine, and finally visualize it.
When most people talk about AI, they focus on the incredible technical achievements. What I don’t hear discussed nearly as much is AI’s potential as a creative collaborator, especially for storytelling.
For me, AI isn’t writing my story. The ideas, characters, kingdoms, lore, and world all come from my imagination. AI helps me ask better questions, explore possibilities, organize ideas, and enrich what already exists in my head. It’s like having an always-available creative partner to bounce ideas off of.
As a software engineer, I’m used to building systems. I realized I naturally approached worldbuilding the same way. Every kingdom has history. Magic has rules. Characters have motivations. Politics have consequences. AI became another tool that helped me connect those systems together while constantly challenging me to think deeper about the world I was creating.
As the story developed over the past few months, I wanted more than words on a page. I wanted to see the world I had been imagining for twenty years.
I started where many people did by running Stable Diffusion locally. It produced some interesting results, but refining every image became tedious. Eventually I shifted toward a workflow built around ChatGPT’s image generation, where I could iterate much more naturally. Once I refined that process, I started getting visuals that genuinely matched the world I’d been envisioning.
One thing I often tell business owners when I consult on AI is that ChatGPT’s greatest strength isn’t just answering questions. It’s refining ideas. It takes vague thoughts written in natural language and transforms them into detailed prompts that other AI tools can understand. I encourage my clients to use ChatGPT as their “prompting engine” before sending requests to image generators, coding assistants, or other AI tools. Better prompts almost always produce better results.
What surprised me most wasn’t the image generation itself. It was how well AI understood my story.
After months of building lore together, it could recall tiny details about kingdoms, characters, motivations, and relationships, then connect those ideas in ways that genuinely surprised me. Even more impressive was its ability to paint a visual representation of what had only existed in my imagination. I’ve never considered myself an artist, so watching AI translate those ideas into images I could actually look at was one of the most rewarding parts of this entire process.
The inspiration for this project came from wanting to create what I call an “American anime.”
I started asking myself, “If this story ever became an anime, what would the opening feel like?”
Anime openings are incredibly poetic. The lyrics often tell their own story without giving everything away. I worked with AI to explore dozens of songs that captured that same feeling in English. After narrowing the list down over several days, I ultimately landed on “Legends Are Made” by Sam Tinnesz. Honestly, choosing the music took longer than creating the video itself.
From there, I broke my story into individual scenes. Using the lore I’d already developed, ChatGPT helped generate image prompts for each moment. Those became concept images representing every shot in the opening. I then used those images as the foundation for image-to-video generation, refining prompts until each sequence matched the emotion I wanted to convey.
Like any creative pipeline, the first result was rarely the final result. Scenes needed refinement. Characters evolved. Images were regenerated. Prompts were rewritten. AI accelerated the process, but it didn’t eliminate iteration. It simply made the feedback loop dramatically faster.
Once I had the still images, the next step was bringing them to life. I had ChatGPT generate image-to-video prompts for each scene, describing camera movement, character actions, environmental effects, and the emotion each shot was meant to convey. Those prompts were then used with Runway to animate the stills. For the image generation itself, I chose Grok Imagine. Initially it was simply because of its affordable pricing, but I ended up being pleasantly surprised by the quality of the results. It consistently produced visuals that matched the style I was aiming for, making it an excellent balance between cost and quality. It reminded me that you don’t always need the most expensive tool to achieve something you’re proud of.
Finally, I brought everything into Premiere Pro. I’m certainly not a professional video editor, but after enough trial and error I ended up with something I’m genuinely proud of.
The entire project cost roughly $50 beyond subscriptions I was already paying for, and once the creative decisions were made, putting everything together only took about five or six hours.
The biggest takeaway for me isn’t that AI can replace people. It’s that AI allows people to create things that were previously beyond their reach. Not everyone has years of experience with animation, concept art, music production, or filmmaking. AI lowers the barrier to entry and gives people the opportunity to express ideas that may have otherwise stayed trapped in their imagination.
That doesn’t mean AI should replace creativity. I think AI works best when you meet it halfway. Do your own thinking, write your own ideas and build your own vision. Then let AI help refine, expand, and accelerate what you’ve already created.
AI didn’t make me a storyteller. It finally gave me the tools to show people the story I’d been carrying around for nearly twenty years. AI can create a picture, but it doesn’t know why the picture matters. That part is still yours. You are the director.
This video exists because I wanted to give a visual identity to a world that has lived in my imagination for a long time. I believe this brand has incredible potential, and this is only the first step in a much longer journey. I’m excited to see where it goes from here.
If Tales of Encenia sounds interesting to you, I’d love for you to follow along. There isn’t much on the YouTube channel yet, but this is only the beginning.