Bullion director Rawtape (aka Manchester-based Rory A Wood) just bolted onto the Stash radar with this riveting AI-enhanced music video for English rockers Kasabian.

Rawtape: “For ‘SCRIPTVRE’ we wanted to examine the postmodern penchant for pastiche, pitching the band against infinite AI interpretations of their own performance in a battle against singularity for originality.

“To achieve this, I worked with four AI artists, Maximilllian Kreig, Kieran Cook, Y7, and Bel Docherty. Each brought their own unique way of utilizing the latest developments of Generated Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create different machine learning interpretations of the band’s performance that I subsequently edited over the original footage.

“Firstly, working with Max (the bedrock of this project, both for handling the most computationally heavy aspects and his expansive knowledge of GANs), we broke the original footage into sequences and fed these into StyleGAN 3.
 

“We wanted to examine the postmodern penchant for pastiche, pitching the band against infinite AI interpretations of their own performance in a battle against singularity for originality.”

 
“Referencing the surreal visual styles of Francis Bacon and H.R.Giger, Kieran Cook was able to use multiple iterations of VQGAN-generated imagery from the source footage and intricately stitch them together to create hyper-detailed individual frames that could then be sequenced. Our aim here was to reference the dystopian potential of AI through the visual language of science fiction established by Ridley Scott and Chris Cunningham.

“Y7 was responsible for the most complex of the AI-generated imagery found in the latter part of the video. We created a dataset from the body rig footage but then utilized a projection model to train StyleGAN2-ADA to attempt to imitate a target frame from the original sequence and create (frame by frame) an AI interpretation of the Band’s performance.

“Bel Docherty was essential to the development of this project allowing me to intricately test ideas, workflow, and concepts for to utilize the numerous different AI models available as well as assisting in the comping of the generated imagery in the editing phase.”
 

 
Artist: Kasabian

Label: Sony Music UK, Columbia Records
Creative Commissioner: Lea Ogunlami
Marketing Manager: Polly Withington
Band Management: John Coyne

Production: Bullion Productions
Director/editor: Rawtape
DOP: Fraser Rigg
EP: Joel Spencer
Producer: Theo Hue Williams
AI Artist: Maximilian Kreig, Y7, Kieran Cook, Belle Docherty
AD: Afzal Robbani
AC: Ondrej Rybar
2AC: Aida Garcia Vega
Camera trainee: Lou Alvarez
Key Grip: Tom North
Grip Assist: Anne Deacon
Gaffer: Nathan Rubins @nathanrubins
Spark: Leo Olesker, Daniel Matthieu, Daniel Svilenov
Art Director: Alan Scott
Art Assist: Nycollas Abreau
Art Runner: Ashen Page
Stylist: Chris Henderson @chrisjohnhend
Stylist Assist: Josh Barber Cruz @jishxkapish
Hair/MUA: Jackie Tyson @jackie_tyson
BTS Photographer: Neil Bedford @neil_bedford
BTS videographer: Arran Ashan @arranashan
Runner: Richard Leimon, Esme Drummond, Yustyna Libicka
PA: Kathryn Chorley

Color: Cinelab Film & Digital
Colorist: Darren Rae
Lab Dailies Producer: Aarti Mahtani
Special Thanks: Joshua Callis-Smith