Wow! I just wrote my Introduce Yourself post yesterday which included this video -- little did I know that there was a Community pretty much dedicated to the EXACT THING I'd just posted! Aliens? It's right in the name! Eyeballs? In every frame! Psychedelic Art? Oozing with it!

So I figured I'd break down the process a bit, my tool chain and a bit of an outline of the project in general. But first things first, here is the video:

Now I want to be clear, there is lots of AI-Gen content in this piece. The lyrics are mine, but the music is generated in Suno. The concept and image prompts are mine, the images generated in OpenArt.ai. The selection of images and the ordering is mine, the morphs were computed in Luma Dream Machine. And ofc the final edit in DaVinci Resolve is all me.

I read the About section of the Community and I couldn't see anything that explicitly stated AI work was not allowed, so I feel like this is a pretty safe place to post this -- spaces that restrict the use of AI art tend to be VERY clear about that, but we shall see what we shall see, shall we?

NCFNM

NCFNM is an experimental, semi-parody project. The idea was simple, create a collection of AI Industrial tunes where I play off popular Industrial (or Industrial-Adjacent) band names - in this case Alien Sex Fiend - and make sure we repeat NCFNM in every song a la KMFDM. As new AI video tech started taking off, it morphed into a full blown music video project, with each song getting its own video using various techs as they came online. The full playlist is here, and all videos are tagged with the tech/websites used. This was the third video, and as mentioned above, employs Suno, OpenArt and Luma. Other tracks use Kling, Noisee (RIP), Hedra and more, often in combination.

_{In this shot Kling(Image) was used to generate the crowd/TV, Luma was used to animate the crowd, and Hedra was used for the singer/lip sync.}

OpenArt.ai

I used OpenArt.ai to generate the images. I went through a lot of prompts, and a lot of iterating before I got where I wanted, but once I landed on the thumbnail used on the video above I knew I had something pretty radical going on. From there I generated about 50-60 more and then shortlisted and shortlisted again until I got my final set. You can see in the image below for instance, I got quite a few full faces, ultimately I opted against using these in the final cut, preferring the more abstract tooth and eyeball situation.

_{Nothing to see here, just your average everyday elritch abominations.}

Luma Dream Machine

The next step was to order the images in a folder, basically I just picked a random mid point, renamed it to 25.jpg and then started sorting what I hoped would be decent morph sources/targets for Luma and naming them ie 24.jpg, 23.jpg and 26,jpg, 27.jpg and so on. This was literally a few days after Luma introduced their keyframe feature: supply a start frame, supply an end frame and let it do the interim frames as a five second chunk. Of all the video clips it generated, I actually used close to 80%-90%, most of the ones on the 'cutting room floor' had either hard transitions or fades (despite me explicitly stating NO FADES in the prompt.) Thanks to my organization of the files ahead of time, these were relatively painless to track and render.

_{Luma image to image intereface.}

DaVinci Resolve

This whole project was my first time using Resolve, but by the time I got to this video I was already feeling pretty confident. I'd used Premier before for a number of projects, and heck even two VHS decks with a jog shuttle so I was already quite familiar with the editing process. Not much to say about the editing portion of this -- as the videos were all just sequential and required no cutting it was a fairly simple matter to just lay them out on the timeline, group 'em as a Compound Clip and then time compress the whole shebang using the Retime Controls to match my song length.

After that it was a simple matter to add a Text Layer, scroll it using X Position Keyframes and render the final version for YouTube.

Final Notes

Well there you have it, hope this is of interest to at least someone out there! It's been a fascinating project and a great learning experience. And while I'm not monetizing NCFNM in any way at the moment, it has led to a bunch of other paid video work for actual bands, for ads, and for game tournaments so hopefully that will continue.... I'm always up for to lay down some creative work for the right project.

Going forward I don't know how interesting it would be to go through every video in the set, but for some of the more technical ones it might be worth it, so I guess let me know in the comments if you'd like to see more of this type of stuff!