Karim Youssef: THOLIN, Voyager 7, Dishonorable and Making Films With the Tool He Built

Viral, just not for him.

Chris and Andrew had screened Dishonorable on the weekly show the day before, and opened with what happened next. Karim posted his Star Wars short on X and it barely moved. Then an account with about 200 followers downloaded it, reposted it without credit, and reached hundreds of thousands of people. Karim's complaint about it went viral too.

“How is it possible that I post a video, it gets thousand views, then another account that has 200 followers posts the video without any tags.”

Karim Youssef▶ 3:04

He wasn't angry with the reposter, who he doubts expected it to blow up. His point was the algorithm. On Instagram, where the film did take off, his own post got his views. Andrew suggested the old hip-hop producer tag: put something in the frame that people know is you. Karim used to add watermarks, but found them ugly, so this time he put his name in the credits, and wished he'd added his handle too.

Then came the story of Mick Jackson, who, as it was told on the show, created Blame It on the Boogie and lost it to the Jacksons' version. The moral: find creative ways to put your mark inside the work.

Practise on the scenes you love.

First up was 13 seconds of Chainsaw Man in live action. Karim made it in November 2025, when Nano Banana came out, to try the model and practise his directing and scene building without having to invent a universe first.

▶ Watch Chainsaw Man live action

“I can just take anime scenes that I know I like and are iconic, and just recreate them, because that forces you to take them apart frame by frame.”

Karim Youssef▶ 10:40

It was his first viral video: a million views on Instagram very quickly, a million on X, and more again when it spread in Japan. Live-action anime recreations soon popped up everywhere, and Duolingo Japan remade the same scene. He likes to believe it kicked off the wave. Salma, whom he credits for the advice, had told him to double down on anything that works, so he did, and built his account that way.

“Don't try to do something because you want it to go viral or do numbers, but do something that you really enjoy.”

Karim Youssef▶ 12:30

Karim grew up in Luxembourg on Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and then anime, and wanted to study 3D design. His mum told him to learn something that would get him a real job, so he took his creativity into an agency instead, Neon Internet, writing concepts for marketing campaigns while dabbling in Blender and Unreal Engine on the side. 3D needs years in every discipline, from character design to rigging and animation, which you can't master as a hobby.

“When AI came out, that was the moment when I realised this might be your once in a lifetime shot.”

Karim Youssef▶ 19:12

Film, he says, hasn't changed like this since CGI arrived with Tron. His content started as a way to promote LetzAI, which he co-founded, and to stay on top of the tools. His team has a saying for it.

“Talking about the thing is not doing the thing, planning the thing is not doing the thing, reading about the thing, doing the thing is doing the thing, and that's what makes you better.”

Karim Youssef▶ 20:05

An ad you'd actually want to watch.

Chris played Karim's spot announcing Seedance 2.5 on LetzAI, then pointed out the producer tag idea already at work in it: the LetzAI L turns up on a credit and on the front and back of a handheld device.

This one did well, Karim said, but the one before did better. As co-founder, his only test is whether the idea is cool enough to convince his partners. Friends he has shown it to say it's cool, but their clients would never let them do it.

“I set out to make an advertisement that you would like to watch, where you're like, okay, that was actually fun to watch, and not something that you kind of sit through.”

Karim Youssef▶ 23:44

Then Chris played a clip Karim didn't know he had found: one of the ad's aliens, whose brain puffs up to announce a skills and memory feature. Sasha on the LetzAI team made it. Once the characters exist, anyone on the team can use them.

“If you have the character locked in, you can just have different people in the team work with it too, and that is another beauty of it. You don't need to reinvent the wheel.”

Karim Youssef▶ 26:15

An idea carried for years.

Chris corrected himself: it was YUKO, not Chainsaw Man, that was three years old. The 30-second trailer from August 2023 was made with Midjourney images animated in Runway and Pika, with an ElevenLabs voice, according to its YouTube description. Karim was careful not to spoil anything, but a big part of YUKO is THOLIN. This was the first time he had the idea for the character.

▶ Watch YUKO (AI trailer)

“A lot of my ideas when I make videos is ideas that I've carried for sometimes years, where at some point in time the stars align and you're like, you know what, I'm actually going to give this one a shot.”

Karim Youssef▶ 27:45

The stars aligned after Karim worked with PJ Ace on his Nexus universe, including a wet market short and a Nexus trailer. That is where he met Steven Quach, a Vietnamese American traditional filmmaker who wanted to learn AI and told Karim to call him if he ever had a project. Karim did: THOLIN, his most elaborate story, the one with the most concrete scenes in his head. He had already made a small proof of concept to get a feel for the world, because thinking about the thing is not doing the thing. They both had two free weeks, and used them.

Anime is his model for stakes. Like Game of Thrones, any favourite character can die, where Western films often shield the viewer. And because it is hand-drawn, anime had to master emotion without detailed facial expressions, the same limit AI filmmakers work with.

“When it's epic, it's really really epic. And I always wanted to see more of that in live action.”

Karim Youssef▶ 33:39

Thirteen drafts and a move to Vietnam.

▶ Watch THOLIN, Episode 01: A Cyberpunk Story

Eight minutes of cyberpunk in Vietnam: a back-street surgeon, bricked gear, unregistered implants, and an unknown substance growing towards his brain stem. Lara in the chat asked whether it was script first. It's back and forth, Karim said, starting with finding the characters.

“We created 13 versions of the script before we were happy.”

Karim Youssef▶ 44:33

He first set the story in the Philippines, simply because Southeast Asia felt like a different twist. Steven asked to move it to Vietnam so he could draw on real stories and culture. The opening track, which Karim made in Suno over days of iterations and Chris remastered, is in a language of the Philippines, and they kept it as a tribute. Filipino viewers noticed in the comments. A music video for it has been in the works for almost three months.

Mary asked whether he would say yes if Disney called about a THOLIN series. It would depend, he said, on how much creative freedom came with it.

Their brand, or your own.

How hard is it to go back to client work after two weeks inside your own world? Very, Karim said. For THOLIN he took some time off, and he has learned a rule about himself.

“The way for me to do it is to just not have more than two, maximum three projects at the same time.”

Karim Youssef▶ 47:27

He wants to live inside a world while he's making it. You have to say no to opportunities, and many of his friends have stepped back from commercial work to make their own things, because there are only two routes right now: your own thing, or someone else's.

“If you keep doing that, you're building their brand and not your own.”

Karim Youssef▶ 48:40

Client work has its upsides. On the big project he is focused on now, with the script and characters handed to him, he can just direct. That focus is also how Dishonorable happened: he wanted to have some fun and generate something, with no crazy story. In the last couple of months he has moved fully to the studio and entertainment side, stepping back from the agency, which his team runs.

Send the robots first.

Voyager 7 was Karim's entry to the Future Vision XPRIZE, and Chris said it would have been in his own top three. Karim had forgotten the deadline until the weekend before, when it came up with friends at the Dor Brothers' house. He told Steven he was going to hate him, and they made it in six days. He entered for exposure, not to win.

“I just thought if I can get just far enough that some industry people see my work, maybe something will come of it, and that's what happened.”

Karim Youssef▶ 53:20

He was approached, and that is now the main project he is working on. The idea was an old one: many of his pieces happen in the same universe, in different timelines. Long human journeys in space would be very hard, if not impossible, so robots will set foot on Mars first and build everything before we arrive.

“If humans ever make contacts with aliens on another planet, it will probably be with our technology, not with ourselves.”

Karim Youssef▶ 55:52

He played with that on purpose. At first you think the explorers are humans, then you find out they're robots, built in our image so that whoever meets them understands what we look like. And they never come back.

▶ Watch Voyager 7 (Official Trailer, Future Vision XPRIZE)

The brief asked for a positive vision of the future, more science than fiction. Chris's favourite part was the mother and daughter. For Karim, that is the point of the whole film.

“If we're talking about the future, it's not for us. We're relatively old when we're talking about the future. It's more for the kids and the world that they will grow up in.”

Karim Youssef▶ 1:05:45

Andrew spotted merchandise in the little creature. Karim was ahead of him: he had everything ready.

First make something worth promoting.

Then the distribution question: after weeks on a film, how does he promote it? Karim has gone full circle, like the bell curve meme. At first you just make cool stuff, then you need email lists and promotion, then you come back to just making cool stuff. A line from MrBeast stuck with him.

“If your video is not performing as well as you thought, then it's probably not as good as you thought.”

Karim Youssef▶ 1:09:12

X is the platform he still hasn't cracked. There, the stills did the work: Chris said Voyager 7's carousel of high-resolution character portraits reached more than 300,000 impressions on its own. Karim also shared alien concepts he never used, because otherwise nobody would ever see them.

“First do something that is worth promoting.”

Karim Youssef▶ 1:12:10

What annoys him most is the AI made this video narrative. Generating one clip and posting it isn't impressive. Gossip Goblin, who has also been on the show, is his model: spend your time fleshing out your universe. Until there is an IP people will pay for, creators invest time and money without being paid at all, which is also why studios keep recycling Batman and Spider-Man.

The forbidden move.

Karim expected heat for using Star Wars, but he sees it as culture, not just IP. A red lightsaber means a Sith, any other colour probably the good guy, and he doesn't need to explain anything else.

▶ Watch Dishonorable

Andrew loved the small things: the hero lowering his lightsaber and looking to the skies, the Sith glancing both ways. Did he prompt that?

“Everything you see was prompted to happen. It doesn't just happen by itself.”

Karim Youssef▶ 1:19:42

He writes each moment by putting himself in the character's shoes. The hero, Sarinin, knows he is outmatched, so his only way to win is the dishonourable one: trakata, switching his blade off and on mid-fight, a move even the Sith won't use. Then he takes the Sith's lightsaber and ship and leaves him alive, the worst humiliation of all. It's personal now. Karim is working on more, and showed Chris a sneak peek in the green room.

A story with no faces.

Chris offered a choice: Black Sun, or OpenAI's new Dots. Karim hadn't tried Dots, so Black Sun it was. He made it when ByteDance gave him early access to Seedance 2.0, which at first blocked any image with a face. So how do you tell a story without faces?

“If you don't put in extra effort, it will not look extra good.”

Karim Youssef▶ 1:26:10

With generative AI, that means spending time and money on things that won't work. But in the rough you find the diamonds, and once one image or a song clicks, the rest falls into place. Black Sun was a training exercise in what Seedance 2 could do, and in world building.

▶ Watch Black Sun

Chris said the restriction suited Karim's style. Then came Kling 4, and whether LetzAI will carry it. Karim wasn't impressed by the Flash version, and before Seedance, Kling 3 was his go-to model, so he hopes the full release fixes speaking. Everything on LetzAI is something he uses himself.

“My priority is quality, not price.”

Karim Youssef▶ 1:36:39

Selling the illusion.

With the show already over time, Karim took a chat question about music. He does almost everything in Suno, and says even its smallest plan gives you a lot to work with, though THOLIN's song took days of tweaking tone and lyrics. When music has to do the heavy lifting, he licenses human-made tracks from Musicbed. Dishonorable's track is Great Sacrifices, and he got in touch with its composer, who liked the film.

“Music is 50% of every video.”

Karim Youssef▶ 1:40:43

Without sound, he says, Dishonorable is two guys standing in front of each other, from different angles. He started with royalty-free music from YouTube, moved to Artlist, then started making his own.

“With the right sound you can sell the illusion, because that's what we're doing, right? We're selling an illusion.”

Karim Youssef▶ 1:42:08

Don't fight the AI.

Karim realised he hadn't talked workflow at all, so he did. LetzAI is his favourite tool, and he doesn't do anything in his videos that can't be done on the platform. Dishonorable is the one exception: a Dreamina partnership gave him free credits for the high-quality generations. Base images come from Seedream 5, because it's cheap enough to generate for hours. He edits in Nano Banana, and avoids GPT Image 2 because of a pattern it leaves that, once you see it, you can't unsee.

“Avoid working against the AI. Don't be married to your idea.”

Karim Youssef▶ 1:46:33

The exception is a rule he and Steven set for future episodes: one or two flex shots where they brute-force two seconds with hours and money. He knows a keeper when he feels it, like the Voyager 7 alien.

“This makes me feel something. This does something to me. I trust that maybe it's going to do something for other people too.”

Karim Youssef▶ 1:47:46

Then patience. His co-founder Misch calls it the value of the synthographic object, better known as the IKEA effect: you like things because you made them. Karim rewatches his films many times. Rewatching Black Sun, he found a cut and sound transitions he'd change. And kill your darlings: shorten the shots you love, so viewers crave what's next.

He signed off with advice from a rapper whose name he couldn't remember: if you put a lot into something, keep talking about it. Find him as karim_yourself everywhere, and as Karim Youssef on LinkedIn.