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Paul Trillo’s The Hardest Part, made for Washed Out, is best described as the first official commissioned music-video collaboration created with OpenAI’s Sora. It was not a one-prompt film: Trillo generated roughly 700 short clips, selected about 55, and edited them into a four-minute journey through love, aging, grief and memory.
The claim, carefully defined
News coverage in May 2024 often called The Hardest Part the “world’s first Sora-powered music video.” That wording is directionally right but too broad. “First” could mean the first experiment, public upload, commercial use or commissioned production. Project documentation from Ars Electronica identifies it more precisely as the first official commissioned music-video collaboration between a music artist and filmmaker made with Sora.
The musician was Washed Out, the stage name of Ernest Weatherly Greene Jr.; Paul Trillo directed, wrote and edited; and Sub Pop supported the release. The approximately four-minute film is available on Vimeo.
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What happens in The Hardest Part
The video appears to move continuously forward through a couple’s life. A camera-like zoom carries the viewer between childhood, adulthood, family life, loss and remembrance. Locations, bodies and objects shift with dream logic rather than conventional continuity.
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Its emotional subject is the passage of time: love becoming family, family becoming memory, and the difficulty of letting go. Ars Electronica’s project description emphasizes those themes and the film’s surreal movement through different ages and spaces (Ars Electronica press text).
How the production worked
Sora supplied generated imagery, but Trillo supplied the authorship and production decisions. Accounts of the project describe an iterative process closer to directing and editing a large field of possibilities than to receiving a finished movie from a single prompt.
- Concept development: Trillo built the treatment around a couple moving through the stages of life. He had considered the central idea for almost a decade but had previously set it aside because it was impractical to shoot (Tech Times).
- Prompting: Text described the story beat, characters’ ages and actions, environments, objects, camera movement, zoom direction and the relationship between adjoining scenes.
- Generation: Sora produced many short attempts. Trillo’s reported total was approximately 700 clips, representing about 230 minutes of source material. Individual generations generally ran 15–20 seconds.
- Review and selection: He kept roughly 55 clips for the final edit and generated additional material when a transition, action or continuity problem needed another attempt.
- Editing and finishing: The selected material was assembled in Adobe Premiere. FXguide also reports After Effects work on some transitions; the production account says 720p generations were later upscaled to 2K, using Topaz Video AI (FXguide).
The Los Angeles Times reported a production period of about six weeks. Those figures should be read as approximate production accounts, not as a repeatable recipe or a promise that identical prompts would produce identical shots.
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What the prompts controlled
Trillo’s prompts functioned partly as scene descriptions and partly as virtual-camera instructions. A reported example begins with a bubble, moves through bubblegum and transitions into a football field. The wording specifies not only what is present but how the image should travel from one idea to the next.
This approach explains the film’s “infinite dolly” feeling. Prompting could suggest a route through time and space, but it did not guarantee that Sora would preserve the same people, geometry or motion. The published accounts do not establish a reusable prompt formula.
Why the visual approach mattered
Surreal transitions
Objects and environments can morph into one another, producing transitions that resemble dreams or recollection more than optical effects planned on a physical set.
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High-volume visual exploration
Trillo could test many versions of a scene without booking a new location, casting performers or rebuilding a set for every variation. The advantage was breadth: many possible images could be explored before the edit was locked.
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The film keeps a tension between recognizable photographic detail and impossible movement. Instability becomes part of the treatment of memory instead of an artifact that must always be hidden.
A shelved idea became producible
Trillo has said the underlying concept had existed for years but practical constraints had prevented it from being made. Sora provided a way to investigate the idea visually, even though it introduced a different set of constraints.
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What Sora did not solve
The Los Angeles Times noted that the couple and their child could change appearance from clip to clip. FXguide likewise describes difficulties maintaining consistent characters, a continuous zoom and reliable shot-to-shot relationships.
- Character identity and wardrobe could drift between generations.
- Spatial and temporal continuity was not dependable.
- Exact camera placement, timing and movement remained difficult to specify.
- Long coherent sequences required many short attempts and substantial curation.
- Editing, compositing and finishing were still necessary.
The central trade-off was control for exploratory abundance. Conventional filmmaking offers repeatable actors, lighting, lenses, blocking and continuity. Generative video offers a much larger set of unexpected images and transitions, but asks the director to tolerate variation and discard most output.
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Verified production details
| Item | Reported detail |
|---|---|
| Film | The Hardest Part by Washed Out |
| Director, writer and editor | Paul Trillo |
| Generation system | OpenAI Sora |
| Final runtime | Approximately four minutes |
| Generated clips | Approximately 700 |
| Clips selected | Approximately 55 |
| Generated source material | Approximately 230 minutes |
| Typical generation length | Roughly 15–20 seconds |
| Production period | About six weeks, according to the Los Angeles Times |
| Editing and finishing | Adobe Premiere; some After Effects work; 720p material reportedly upscaled to 2K |
| Release | May 2024; contemporary reports are dated May 2 and May 3 |
Was it really the world’s first?
It depends on the definition. The strongest documented claim is not that no one had ever uploaded an AI-made music video, but that Trillo and Washed Out made the first official commissioned music-video collaboration using Sora. That wording distinguishes an authorized artist project from informal tests, demos or unrelated public experiments.
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“Entirely made with Sora” also needs qualification. Sora generated the central imagery, while humans developed the concept, wrote prompts, selected takes, solved gaps, edited the sequence and performed post-production. Trillo’s reported comments about not manually creating every image describe the abundance of generated options, not the absence of editing.
What filmmakers can learn from the experiment
- Use generative video to explore visual development and difficult transitions before committing to a conventional shoot.
- Plan for selection rather than assuming every generation is usable.
- Design concepts that can absorb variation when continuity is fragile.
- Keep editorial judgment at the center: the story emerges from choosing, ordering and timing shots.
- Treat unusual artifacts as possible style elements, but reject them when they damage character or narrative clarity.
The project therefore demonstrates a new kind of directing labor, not the disappearance of filmmaking labor. The director’s job shifts toward specifying possibilities, evaluating large volumes of material and shaping accidents into meaning.
Can you reproduce the original Sora workflow today?
Not through the original Sora web or app experiences. OpenAI says those services were discontinued on April 26, 2026. The Sora API is scheduled for discontinuation on September 24, 2026 (OpenAI’s discontinuation notice).
That makes the 2024 production historically important but not a current, step-by-step Sora tutorial. A comparable present-day workflow would require a currently available video-generation service researched separately, followed by editing and finishing in tools such as Premiere Pro or an equivalent editor. The reported project’s editing and upscaling stages remain useful as production principles, but Sora access itself should not be assumed.
The lasting significance
The Hardest Part matters because it made generative video part of an official music-artist production while exposing both its promise and its cost. Sora enabled Trillo to explore impossible camera journeys and revive a concept that had been impractical to stage. It also demanded hundreds of attempts, careful selection and tolerance for unstable characters and continuity.
The useful conclusion is not that an AI system made a music video by itself. It is that generative video can act as a high-volume visual development and shot-exploration system—one whose final meaning still depends on human direction, editing and taste.
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