GIL - Mes nuits, 2025

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Inspiration

The project began with a shockingly simple observation: more than 20,000 AI-generated tracks are uploaded online every single day. This overflow of automated music raised questions that felt urgent to me: What remains of the author when the machine writes, sings, and composes? How do we still recognise ourselves in the noise?

I turned to Colette Renard’s 1958 song Les Nuits d’une demoiselle - a masterpiece of playful eroticism, linguistic virtuosity, and feminist subversion. Reinterpreting it in 2025 through the lens of AI felt like a way to test the resilience of the French language, its humour, and its sensuality in an era of infinite machine-made content.

Visually, I drew from a deliberately eclectic constellation:

Barbara Cartland, Colette Renard, Barbie, Booba, SCH, PNL, Jul, Sofia Coppola, Tim Burton, Chris Cunningham, David LaChapelle, Eva & Adele, Martin Parr, Cardi B, Michel Gondry, Julien Doré, Lil Nas X …

This hybrid landscape shaped the identity of GIL, a character who is both masculine and ambiguous, tender and ironic, a pink-washed witness of our mediated world.

The entire film is also rooted in my ongoing artistic practice :

making AI a painter’s palette, a material to knead, sculpt, and bend. Light, texture, colour - everything is mixed like pigments to find the right tone. This approach aligns with the Brechtian “mise en étrangeté” that runs through my work: a deliberate slight strangeness that invites distance, reflection, and play.

I chose the 4:5 portrait format in conscious reference to social-media codes- the spaces where identity is performed, multiplied, and consumed.

What it does

GIL- Mes nuits, 2025 is a short AI-driven music film that

• reinterprets a historic French song through contemporary aesthetics,

• blurs the line between gendered identities,

• questions authorship in the age of algorithmic creation,

• and stages an intimate, ambiguous self-portrait.

It is at once playful and critical: a pop object, a visual poem, a digital mirror.

How I built it

The film was created entirely on a smartphone, from concept to final export.

• AI image generation (Photoleap) – creation of all portraits through layered prompting, texture tuning, and iterative refinement.

• AI video animation (PixVerse) – giving life to still images via micro-gestures (breathing, blinking, soft head movements).

• AI music (Suno) – generating the musical reinterpretation while preserving the structure and melodic spirit of the 1958 piece.

• AI voice sculpting – blending tonal qualities to create a voice that feels both human and synthetic.

• Adobe Premiere Rush (mobile) – assembly, editing, pacing, overlays, and colour micro-adjustments.

• Prompt editing as artistic method – the real craft: mixing visual “pigments”, sculpting atmosphere, calibrating pink tones, and defining GIL’s identity through hundreds of iterations.

Challenges I ran into

• Controlling the AI’s stylistic excess: avoiding caricature while embracing pop aesthetics required endless refinement.

• Balancing irony and sincerity: GIL had to be strange, tender, and unsettling at once.

• Adapting the erotic humour of 1958 to 2025 without falling into parody.

• Ensuring coherence across multiple AI tools, each producing different textures and behaviours.

• Working entirely on a smartphone, which imposed constraints that ultimately became part of the film’s identity.

• Finding a musical tone that honoured Colette Renard without imitating her.

Accomplishments that I’m proud of

• Crafting a consistent visual universe from fragmented tools.

• Turning historical material into a contemporary, queer-coded, ambiguous character.

• Achieving all production steps - writing, images, sound, editing, mastering - solo, with a coherent artistic direction.

• Using AI not as a shortcut but as a delicate, painterly material, with real craftsmanship in prompt editing.

• Remaining faithful to the playful spirit of the original text while making it resonate today.

What I learned

• AI is only as interesting as the intent behind it.

• Prompt editing is a true artistic discipline, close to colour mixing or photographic direction.

• Constraints (like the 4:5 format or mobile production) can become aesthetic strengths.

• The frontier between human and machine creation is less about tools than about tone, humour, and sensitivity.

What's next for GIL - Mes nuits, 2025

This film is the first chapter of a broader exploration of identity, pop culture, and the performativity of the self in AI-augmented spaces.

Next steps include:

• expanding GIL into a micro-series of portrait-songs.

• documenting the creative process as a form of research.

• and building a longer film where human and machine co-author an evolving narrative.

Built With

• photoleapai
• pixelup
• pixverseai
• premieremobile
• suno