A$AP Rocky Turns Viral Mosh Pit Meme into Experimental Mashup for 'Shittin’ Me' Video

A$AP Rocky’s new music video, created by Grin Machine (Dan Streit of Stink Films and Cole Kush), references his viral mosh pit meme with nods to Weekend at Bernie’s in a bizarre mashup of experimental AI visuals. The track and video were released in collaboration with EA’s new video game Need for Speed: Unbound. The film opens with Rocky at the height of his career, barking orders at office employees. After a crowd-surfing incident, he collapses and dies. His friends then begin puppeteering his dead body in an effort to continue benefiting from his fame.

Grin Machine were tapped by Rocky who gave them complete creative freedom to make the video. GM explain, “It was this weird and beautiful situation where Rocky had no notes & was fully on board to try out anything with our bizarre narrative. We’re super very grateful for that.” The ambitious narrative was broken up into three non-sequential shoot days, making it tricky to keep everyone conceptually organized. GM took an atypical approach to their unique production design, curating some set decoration & using AI tools to build upon the setups. Streit and Kush handles all the editing and VFX themselves, implementing experiments from various AI tools including Stable Diffusion, Dall-E 2, RunwayML, amongst others.

“We set out to make something that somewhat combined a goofy 80’s-90’s comedy movie narrative, told through a bizarre and frenetic mashup of experimental AI visuals, while still treating it as a “cool rap video.” We HOPE we have succeeded with this!” said GM.

“Shittin’ Me’ serves as the lead track from the game soundtrack and with so much excitement around it, it was only natural to also do a music video.” Rocky said in a statement to Billboard. “Grin Machine did a great job paying homage to the game collaboration with AWGE with the fun wacky aesthetics, and shout out to krash and hec for the music as always.”