Genesis

A 48-second trailer for a film that does not exist: humanity hands everything to its machines, is enslaved and hunted, and rises to take the world back. Nicolas Neubert, then a product designer at Volkswagen, posted it on X on July 26, 2023 and it passed a million views within days. Every frame is a Midjourney still animated in Runway Gen-2, cut in CapCut over a royalty-free track, about seven hours of work in total: 316 Midjourney prompts, 310 Runway generations, 44 clips in the final edit.

Genesis was the clip that made the summer of 2023 feel like a turning point. The teal-and-amber grade, the slow pushes and the sense of scale looked like a studio tease rather than a tech demo, and it traveled far outside the AI community, with coverage in Forbes and VentureBeat. Neubert's making-of thread two days later became one of the most shared workflow breakdowns of the Gen-2 era, and the Midjourney plus Runway recipe it laid out was the standard pipeline for the rest of the year.