Wishing Wells
and Winds of Change.
A short film about career adaptation in the AI era, told through the lens of 1980s nostalgia. KITT, Conky, a Cracker Barrel parking lot, and a strip mall business offering A.I.-optimized resumes to go.
This project started with a simple question: what does career adaptation look like for someone who grew up in the analog era but needs to thrive in an AI-driven job market? The answer, of course, involved KITT from Knight Rider, Conky from Pee-wee's Playhouse — and a strip mall business offering A.I.-optimized resumes to go.
The concept came from personal experience. A couple of months after being laid off, I found myself navigating an ocean of job applications, haplessly trying to outwit ATS screeners with little success. Every LinkedIn submission felt like pitching pennies into a wishing well, with the "500 people clicked apply in the last hour" banner reminding me of glimmering coins covering the bottom of 1990s shopping mall water fountains.
Every LinkedIn application felt like pitching pennies into a wishing well.
A semi-truck rolls into a Midwest strip mall and drops off KITT. I step out, walk into the Wishing Well, and meet Conky 2000 — cameos from Johnny 5 and Dot Matrix in the background, all silent, because the joke doesn't need them to talk. The film ends on an '80s-style freeze-frame, the closing credits a list of tools and the line "for being there" next to Cracker Barrel.
Every shot was built on an image-to-video workflow: a hero plate, a character model, compositing, upscaling, and traditional color and sound work. The technical challenge wasn't generating impressive visuals. It was maintaining narrative coherence, character consistency, and comedic timing across scenes created through different systems while telling a story about straddling the familiar and the foreign.
Wrote, directed, starred in, edited, and finished the piece.