Gonzo Jimbonzo: Funky Plastic Bag

Inspiration

The original inspiration for the project was just that we had a song and wanted a music video for it. I (Arto Deto, Gonzo Jimbonzo drummer) had been a fan of weird AI videos and thought that maybe we could a makeshift video with some weird AI clips parsed together. I found Hailuo AI that could do good likenesses of persons and just loaded in some random faceshots of ourselves and started testing. After some testing of some weird clips with bandmembers playing on trucks speeding through town or African savannah I noticed that the tool was actually pretty good and could create stuff that didn't look that AI-ish so I scrapped the "random clips"-idea and decided to try if we could do a real music video, with plot and locations and all that. So Hailuo AI in itself was an inspiration here, I must admit.

What it does

Let's face it, most AI music videos look so AI that it hurts because they lack direction and editing, a flow, that times in with the rhytm of the music. So I decided to use my editing skills for my advantage here, not just put some 6-10s clips after one another. I had a few ideas when I started and the plot of the video kind of came from that. I knew some key points in the song where I wanted something to happen and the general flow of the story (beginning -> street -> meets woman -> goes to club -> in the club) and started to fill out from that, always timing the cuts in sync of the music. The basic idea was to create an music video that didn't look too much that it was created by AI, both visually and editing-wise.

How we built it

Repetition. I was able to use Hailuo AI with unlimited credits and used that to my advantage, trying to get good or reasonable shots about everything. I created the a lot of filler material of members playing on the street and similar stuff and used those to fill the space between key shots. I think over 2000-3000 6s clips were rendered for the project, a lot of tests to refine the prompts, a lot of failed clips, many good ones where just left unused because better ones were unavailable, some belonged to video storylines that were cut out, haven't actually counted how many were actually used, maybe 100-150)

Challenges we ran into

Though Hailuo AI (v1) is advanced and a good tool, it is by no means mature and many clips were really really hard to get right. Some were understandably hard ("A guitarist flying in the sky with a rocket pack playing a solo") but some really simple ones also proved almost impossible. A shot where the main character hands his bag to cloakroom assistant took over 200 renderings and still the result in the video sucks but you run out of patience at some point looking at the chaotic results. One of the reason was also the difficulty to get prompts right and definitive and as they got longer the results became more and more chaotic. Also a challenge was to keep the characters and their clothing somewhat constant and they do vary a lot in the finished product if you look closely. Blooper reel exists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6TVjAojWqg Also some ideas had to be left out because they just were impossible to do. One great problem for character interaction was that you only could have one image defined character in one shot, so band members don't actually meet each other during the video and with the main character and the leading AI lady it just got lucky for a couple of times and the definition image of the leading lady is actually taken from one of the videos rendered with her and the main character and then used in her solo shots.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Made a good and funny music video that isn't that much AI looking and kind of captures the essence of the band

What we learned

Prompt management is important. In the next project I used a Chatgpt based prompt system that kept the character and location definitions more constant and helped me to define more precise prompts

What's next for Gonzo Jimbonzo: Funky Plastic Bag

The attitude for AI music videos is rather negative, but still looking forward to do another video for our group or any other act and have been working with some projects and ideas.

Built With

• hailuoai