I've been producing House music for a couple decades. After playing the label game for the past 10 years, I'm now happily self-releasing. This means I have much more control over my brand and creative. The large majority of my target demo is on Instagram, and I regularly create IG reels as part of each release's promotional assets. For my release, "Happy, Joyous, And Free," I decided to create a 40 second video using genertive AI.
I wanted a visualization that had an endless, fly-through quality to match the looping, evolving vibe of the music. Something with a defined figure / ground, abstract yet concrete. I cracked open my dusty art history books from college and began looking at the work of some of my old faves: Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Giacometti, and Robert Rauschenberg. I decided to create a shimmering, reflective sculpture on a beach, with bright blue skies and fluffy clouds.
The first challenge was to translate my vision into a prompt for Midjourney and get the sophisticated results I had in mind, i.e. cinematic, with specific lighting effects, and with the camera angle I envisioned:
Futuristic abstract heroic sculpture on beach. Surface is highly reflective, smooth, with wavey curves, forming a circle in the middle. High contrast neutral metallic colors. Beautiful blue sky with white clouds in background and ocean in the distance. Peaceful, serene, and dreamy mood. Eye level shot --ar 9:16
This prompt, along with several variations, produced a number of images I liked.
The next step was to generate video clips in Runway from the Midjourney stills. I used Runway's Gen-2 motion brush to add movement to the sculpture, and specified first and last keyframes to ensure a seemless loop. Finally, I added type elements and a bumper at the end that teased the album artwork.
This unboosted reel got 2494 plays, 617 replays, 52 likes, 17 comments, and 166 conversions to my Spotify. These aren't mind-blowing numbers compared to your average TikTok dance vid, however, I'm happy with the results.
I think we're in the very early days of generative AI. There were many morphing, melting, and bizarre Runway renders that I had to throw out. Still, the process was fluid and quick enough for me to iterate on the fly. With Midjourney, I had to force myself to revise the prompt instead of just photoshopping things I wanted to change. After a while I felt like I had a lot of control over the form and style of my imagery and really started enjoying the process.