About

Welcome to ICETAP

My name is Tom Pautler. I am a Catholic convert, husband, father, grandfather, and lifelong learner exploring the intersection of faith, digital music, and visual storytelling.

This site serves as a creative journal and production workshop documenting my journey creating complete music videos that celebrate the lives, virtues, and enduring courage of the Saints. From early lyric sketches and melody composition to storyboarding, audio stem mixing, and final visual assembly, every post reflects a commitment to learning the craft in public.

"Above all, this work is anchored in daily life: striving to be a better person, spouse, father, and friend through continuous prayer, faithful study, and purposeful action."

The Production Workflow

Each project is built from the ground up, blending Catholic themes with modern digital tools:

• Ideation: I’m always searching for topics in my daily life—things I can genuinely relate to and that others might enjoy. Ultimately, I create these projects for my own personal and creative growth, but if others appreciate what I share, that makes the journey even more rewarding. I currently use Gemini Notebooks to organize my research and brainstorm ideas for individual projects.
• Songwriting & Arrangement: I built a dedicated Gemini Notebook loaded with resources on the craft of songwriting, then used that foundation to create a custom Gem that coaches me through lyric structure. I’ve always found it challenging to feel where natural word accents fall, so having an AI partner flag when I’ve broken meter with a weak syllable—or suggest bending a soft vowel for an acoustic ballad—has been invaluable. While I’ve always been purposeful with lyrical meaning, in my early tracks I simply hoped Suno would figure out the musical phrasing (which meant a lot of trial, error, and settling). Starting with Courage to Bend and Never Alone, I shifted focus to structural rhythm. On both songs, I started by locking in the chorus, experimenting across genres and vocal styles until the melody resonated. Once that anchor is set, I map out the pre-chorus, verses, and bridge. Bottom line: I don’t finalize the lyrics until the chorus, genre, and vocal identity are firmly established.
• Audio Production: This remains my steepest learning curve. I don’t play an instrument, I don’t sing, and I can’t easily hear full melodies in my head before they exist. It’s an area where I’m eager to grow—if you have suggestions or techniques for sharpening this part of the workflow, I’d love to hear them!
• Visual Direction & Storyboarding: After managing my earliest videos across Gemini and a Google Sheet, I built a custom Storyboard Director Gem that now guides the visual process from start to finish. I feed it my completed lyrics, SRT timestamps, musical style notes, and research. From there, we map out visual concepts verse by verse. I avoid pure photorealism, preferring distinct artistic styles that serve the narrative. For example, on Courage to Bend, every shot originated as a fully rendered still, with most scenes combining two overlapping layers using masks in CapCut. On Never Alone, pairing a realistic protagonist with watercolor bleed backgrounds proved tricky, so I relied heavily on targeted visual prompts instead. Structuring the Gem with custom slash commands (like /status and /roadmap) let me retire the spreadsheet entirely and keep the entire scene map organized in one place.
• Timeline Assembly: I bring everything together in CapCut, assembling 4- to 8-second clips, applying transitions, and synchronizing visual beats to the audio. I begin by importing the final WAV file and separating it into vocal and instrumental stems. I place beat markers on the instrumental track and bar markers on the vocal track. Next, I generate an LRC file (using this site) to import timed lyric captions, manually adjust the end times for each line, and export a clean SRT file to drive the storyboarding workflow above.

Explore the Work

To watch recent releases and behind-the-scenes production breakdowns:

• Browse recent releases in the Music Videos Archive
• Subscribe and watch on the YouTube Channel