This movie shows and sings the tale of a poet; falling into dreams, travelling in fantaisies. A movie made of images generated by an artificial intelligence, giving to the movie the flickering texture of daydreams and memories.
A few words of explanation:
The movie is mainly build around a sequence of images generated by the AI model called “StableDiffusion”. The first input was a sequence of reference images that were given to me directly by HappyDieYoung. The sequences started with images of someone looking through the window; it went then to a forest, a party in a castle, to finish on antique statues. I took these images and tried to extract prompts, or sequence of words, that would give interesting outputs when given to the AI.
I built then, in 3d – with Unreal Engine – a video sequence that would fit, in one long sequence shot, all the elements I wanted to show in the music video. I had to create a scenery and a global motion that would be synced with the music video. This 3d sequence was then graded to match the colours I wanted, in tone with the HappyDieYoung aesthetics, and to give more variations of contrast and lights through the video.
Next, the graded 3d export was given as an input to StableDiffusion, along with the sequence of prompts found in the first part. This produced me something close to the final version, however at this point I also had to go back and forth between all the previous steps, in order to find the perfect set of prompts, matched with keyframes for the prompts as well as for the camera motion. The difficulty to work with an AI is that by slight changes in the input image or the prompt you have very different result. It was thus a trial and error process, with a complex workflow that needs the full sequence (3d > grading > AI render with different promps) to operates, and so, takes time.
When I was globally happy with the results, I just added slight changes of grading, blur, grain and small edits (mixing different renders for the chorus, mainly). And, icing the cake, we added an ai-generated text.
AI International Film Festival (Park City, Utah, USA, 2023)
Experimental Dance Music Film Festival (Toronto, Canada 2023) – WINNER BEST ANIMATION
Berlin Indie Film Festival (Berlin, Germany, 2023) – WINNER BEST MUSIC VIDEO
On Art – Dance&Music (Warszawa, Poland, 2023)
Paris Lift Off Festival (Paris, France, 2023)
Printemps des Arts (Maisons-Alfort, France, 2023) – Jury’s Prize
