20/05/2025
Happy Trails Animation just finished making 3 innovative music videos for Freezemachine, animated for their fantastic new songs: “Thought You Knew,” “Edge Of A Knife,” and, “It’s All Over.” Our challenge was to integrate Ai into our mixed-media styles to create specific worlds for each song. Our collage of interwoven imagery is reminiscent of videos created in the 80s and 90s by music video director, Jim Blashfield, for The Talking Heads’ “And She Was,” Paul Simon’s "Boy In The Bubble,” Tears For Fears’ “Sowing The Seeds Of Love,” and many more.
For this project we payed homage to those old Bond titles in silhouette. The second video played with the ranges of style between MANGA and Anima. And the latest on playing with an old style 3D like in the music video “Money For Nothing” from the Dire Straights and early Playstation.
Jim took photos with film and motion picture silhouette cameras, printed them out on Xerox machines, and assembled them into scenes so that every spinning element was from single animated element layered together.
For Freezemachine we created a hybrid of Ai and other complimenting softwares to create our own layered styles. By experimenting what I found was, right now Ai is not quite to where everyone fears in terms of being automated but we are close. We are also at a point with this tech where if we let evil take over... it will.
Ai is not the solution but Artist Assisted Ai is. The true fear artists have about Ai stealing their styles are right on track because right now Ai is working off of major systems considered open to anyone who wants to plug in which means you are working in a big vat of image goo. However, now with the new Nvidia unit you can create your own closed Ai brain and train it only with promptings within your own art creations. Right now Ai is open which is why I used it with these music videos … they are not for sale, plus we did create our own unique styles.
I believe the answer to creating with Ai lies in the hybrid world. It’s up to the creative folks to take the lead. I am developing a new project and will be posting some teasers soon.
Here are a few hybrid style snippets from the fun things we are playing with.