When Mark Gill recently traveled to Tokyo to scout out locations for his next film, he had the opportunity to shoot a music video for the artist OUR FINAL INVENTORY.
The group’s moniker is inspired by the book of the same name by James Barrett, which examines the dangers posed by the growing and unchecked rush to artificial intelligence.
With that in mind, Mark came up with the idea of using Stable Diffusion AI to incorporate it into his videos.
Mark said, “I asked Tadanobu Asano (Ichi the Killer/Mortal Kombat/Mighty Thor), the main actor of the new movie, if he had time in Tokyo at night to appear in this video, and he was very kind. Filmed in 3 hours on the iPhone 13 Pro.We were driving around Shibuya Crossing in the rain, with more and more onlookers following us.”
After editing the footage, Mark collaborated with digital artist VOLTAINE, and the edits were reinterpreted by AI. The idea was to send Asano back in time to the Edo period by “pointing” the source footage to specific images of old samurai and Kabuki masks.
Mark said: “Added to this footage were more shots of his sequence of performances shot again on his iPhone in my backroom in Manchester. We synthesized the performance on the digital screen.”
Once everything is in place, the source footage is blended with the AI-generated sequence to achieve the effect of Asano morphing between modern Tokyo and the past.
The Chase Films feel the results were quite successful.
