Broccoli Man, Remastered

Summary

Broccoli Man, Remastered November 16, 2025 / 10 min read Within Google there is a series of videos starring “Broccoli Man” poking fun at the experience of building software as a Googler. One of these, “I just want to serve 5TB”, circulated extremely widely and ended up getting published publicly to YouTube. It’s a Google cultural classic that still resonates 15 years later (though with mostly different specifics thwarting Googlers’ ability to “just” do simple things). A few Saturdays ago I found myself in need of distraction and with some hours to spare. I had recently been reminded of the Broccoli Man video and decided to recreate it using the latest and greatest AI technology available at Google. I was pretty pleased with the result! VIDEO In a single day, using Veo 3.1 and Nano Banana, I was able to create a 4-minute short film that has plenty of glitches and inconsistencies but I felt captured the spirit of the original. So let’s dive into how it was made… Making Broccoli Man Remastered Note: I’m somewhere in the “prosumer” realm in terms of video production skillset. I’ve used plenty of creative tools (largely Adobe suite: Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator) and have done video production as an occasional hobby for years, but never professionally and never very regularly. Overall Process The total process, from idea to end product, was completed over a single Saturday. I’d estimate it was something like: Script / Previz: 30-45 minutes Main Veo Production: 3-4 hours Post-production and Editing: 2 hours Tools used: Preproduction Script / Veo Prompts. I used AI Studio with YouTube attachment enabled to take the original video and break it down into a set of suggested 8 second scenes. I skimmed over these and did a few suggested passes to e.g. try to keep continuous dialogue within a single scene, add some cinematic angles, etc. This was mostly useful as a script organization and brainstorming exercise — I ended up manually editing almost every prompt to match my own...