Drive for Your Life: VANDAL’s AI-Powered Experiment in Limitless Storytelling

We are living through the most exciting era to be a creative. For the first time, the limits that used to define what stories could or could not be told—budget, technology, time, confidence—are dissolving. With AI, what once seemed impossible is now within reach.

At VANDAL, we wanted to test just how far we could push these new creative boundaries. The result was Drive for Your Life—a 10-minute AI-generated short film filled with chaos, carnage, fast cars, and rampaging dinosaurs. It was never meant to be a traditional production. Instead, it was an experiment in possibility: what happens when you give creatives access to the most powerful storytelling tools in history?

Inspiration in Fragments

The idea sparked from a collision of influences: Gareth Edwards’ journey from zero-budget Monsters to Godzilla and Rogue One; the release of a new Jurassic Park; the buzz around Formula 1 cinema. We’d seen what others were doing with AI-generated video—like Kavan the Kid’s pioneering shorts—and asked ourselves: why not us?

At first, all we could create were stills using MidJourney. They looked incredible, but animation was out of reach. The tech wasn’t there. So the concept sat on a shelf.

Building the Impossible, One Tool at a Time

As new platforms emerged, we kept experimenting. LumaLabs gave us cars racing alongside dinosaurs. Kling delivered motion, but only in slow, dreamlike shots. Higgsfield added dynamic camera moves and lip sync. Runway Aleph let us inject explosions and dust clouds. Minimax allowed the violent collisions we couldn’t get elsewhere. Freepik and Flow unlocked dialogue. ElevenLabs gave us commentators. Google Veo3 even let us put ourselves into the film—complete with a South African accent for a cameo role.

Each breakthrough was another piece of the puzzle. What started as a folder of “impossible scenes” slowly became a film.

The Soundtrack of a New Era

The music was as much a playground as the visuals. Using Suno and Producer.ai, we composed an authentic Motown-inspired finale track—rich, soulful, and indistinguishable from a live band. We layered in a hard-hitting hip hop track for the credits. Across the project, AI generated over a dozen original tracks, each with its own character.

For me, a lifelong musician, this was one of the most surprising and joyful parts of the process: the soundtracks felt not like imitations but like genuine new creations.

A 10-Minute Experiment That Became a Film

When we stitched the footage together, Drive for Your Life ran a full ten minutes. Longer than planned, perhaps—but we didn’t mind. It was an experiment, and the sheer thrill of pulling it off outweighed any considerations of runtime.

We had no script. No grand production plan. Just the question: what can we do with these tools? And each answer led to another experiment, another scene, another impossible idea brought to life.

Lessons for the Future

The greatest lesson we learned is confidence: with enough persistence, almost anything can be created now. Future projects will start with a tighter story and locked-down sequences, rather than a freeform experiment. But that’s the beauty of this moment—we’re still figuring out the rules as we go.

As Gareth Edwards showed with Monsters, sometimes experiments grow into movements. Drive for Your Life has given us a taste of what’s possible. And it has us already sketching ideas for future episodes, new genres, and even commercial work—drama, animation, advertising.

This is only the beginning.