Astronata MV

In spring 2023 Grimes opened her voice to everyone: anyone could make songs with it. The music duo Astronata, always at the front edge of technology, could not walk past that. On Grimes's voice, with music by Dub Beans, they made two dark, ritual songs and created a clip for each of them.

Generative AI was only beginning then. For artists it was hard to learn, and consistent results were almost impossible to get. We took it on anyway, with curiosity and enthusiasm. Nata shot video at home and generated the shots in Stable Diffusion. My task was to pick them up from there: to build a story out of them and add what the generations lacked at the time: continuity, a stable style, and a single plot holding it all together.

My main mission across these two projects was to find technical, engineering-minded, creative and inventive ways to pull the flaws of generative AI up to the level of a high-end production: with effects, colour correction and editing.

Both clips were made fast and on frighteningly small budgets. Basilisk's Lullaby came out in July 2023, Silent Graves in September. Even then it was clear that art was standing at the edge of a revolution. These two films show how it began.