The Big Dream is a music video about the unique ‘moment’ the film is released in. It describes our collective dream and the collective consciousness of the ‘right now.’
Set to David Lynch’s slippery, uneasy melodies of “The Big Dream,” the generative visuals are created based on images from the current day’s news cycle.
The final result is a video generated from the world’s consciousness on the day of release. The intention was to later release multiple versions of the video, tailored to a specific time or audience. For example, there could be a video for the day of release, a video for the New Year, a video for London or Moscow, a video using only David Lynch films as source, etc.
This unique project presented the novel use of image synthesis models to create an artistically and technologically novel music video.
How It’s Made
Step 1: Building the Visual Structure of the Film
The first step in the creation of “The Big Dream” was to build a ‘tone animation’ that coordinated with the music track. This is an abstract mixture of color and tone that creates the visual structure of the film. It includes all of the elements you would design for a traditional film like pacing, color, light, etc.
This film is never seen, but acts as a data template for the final output.
Step 2: On Day of Release, Process the News
The day the video was to be released, a simple script grabbed headlines from various News feeds (Guardian, New York Times, Al Jazeera via RSS and Twitter).
Using that list of words, Mital and Boehm then pulled related, creative common licensed photos from place like Google Images, Flickr, Wikipedia, Fotopedia, etc. The software then built a database of ‘texture images’ and sorted them by color and tone.
Step 3: Build the Film
Using the tone animation as a template, custom developed software created a film out of the texture images. Images from that day’s News sources were mixed, ripped apart and put back together as a near replica of the template film. The day’s News is smashed and pressed, creating a film that is 100% made out of the ‘right now’.
In the early testing example below, Mital reconstructed Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss using only three works by Van Gogh. The software looks at Klimt’s work and pulls out the matching areas in Van Gogh, depending on our settings for size and shape. It then combines these pieces into a singular whole that matches the composition of Klimt’s work.
Additional Links
24 hour news cycle video collage | creativeapplications.net
Great video collage shows what 24 hours of news looks like | itsnicethat
Credits
Co-director – Parag K. Mital
Co-director – Evan Boehm
Music by David Lynch