Our Final Invention - A Smile to Remember

On a recent trip to Tokyo where Mark Gill was location scouting his next film, he had the chance to shoot a music video for the artist OUR FINAL INVENTION.

The moniker of the group was inspired by the book of the same name by James Barrett, which looks at the dangers poised by the growing and unchecked rush towards Artificial Intelligence.

With that in mind, Mark struck upon the idea to use Stable Diffusion AI and incorporate it into the video.

Mark: “I asked the lead actor from my new film, ASANO TADANOBU (Ichi The Killer / Mortal Kombat / Thor) if he had a spare evening in Tokyo to star in the video and he very graciously gave up his time. Shot in 3 hours on an iPhone 13 Pro - we found ourselves running around Shibuya Crossing in the rain with an ever-increasing amount of onlookers trailing in our wake.”

Once Mark had the footage edited, he then collaborated with digital artist VOLTAINE where the edit was then reinterpreted by the Ai. The idea was to send Asano back in time to the Edo Period, by ‘pointing’ the source footage at specific images of old Samurai and Kabuki masks.

Mark: “The footage was further supplemented by performance sequence shots in my back room in Manchester, again on an iPhone. We then composited the performances onto the ubiquitous digitals screen contained in views of Tokyo I picked up over the two weeks of my trip.”

Once everything was in place it was a case of blending the source footage and Ai generated sequences together to achieve the effect of Asano morphing between modern day Tokyo and the past.

We feel the result was pretty successful.