I LIVE

Inspiration

The inspiration for iLive came from a poem I wrote during a moment of deep reflection about identity, emotion, and the ways we navigate the world through inner images. The poem evolved into a song, and from that song emerged a visual universe. The animations were designed not to illustrate the text literally, but to echo the sensations behind it — fragments of memory, flashes of color, emotional textures, and the rhythm of breathing. The project was inspired by the idea of turning an intimate piece of writing into a living, moving world.

What it does

iLive transforms a personal poem into a multisensory audiovisual experience. It merges original music, written and composed by me, with a fully animated visual narrative that reacts to the emotional tone of the track. The project creates a flow between text, sound and image, allowing the viewer to feel the poem rather than simply read or hear it. It’s a hybrid work: part music video, part visual poem, part digital art experiment.

How we built it

I started by writing and recording the poem, shaping it into a musical structure. After composing and producing the track, I designed the animation concepts around specific feelings and beats within the song. Using AI-assisted illustration tools and animation techniques, I generated visual sequences inspired by the sonic landscape and the imagery within the lyrics. The process was iterative: music informed animation, animation informed new musical adjustments, and the piece grew organically in both mediums.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was keeping emotional coherence between the poem, the track, and the animations. AI tools can produce powerful visuals, but guiding them to match subtle moods required constant experimentation and refinement. Ensuring visual consistency across scenes — color palette, character motifs, artistic style — was also a technical challenge. Another difficulty was transforming abstract feelings into animation without losing the intimacy of the original poem.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I’m proud that iLive remains authentic to the original poem while expanding it into a richer artistic form. It became more than a music video — it became a new way of expressing a very personal piece of writing. I’m also proud of how the project blends human creativity with AI techniques without compromising emotional truth. The final result feels cohesive, poetic and alive.

What we learned

We learned how to better direct AI tools to serve artistic intention rather than override it. We also learned that poems can evolve into new mediums when treated as creative seeds, not finished texts. The production taught us how to maintain emotional consistency across sound, image and movement, and how to let the artistic process be both experimental and structured.

What's next for I LIVE

Next, iLive will expand into an extended visual series where each stanza of the poem becomes its own animated vignette. We plan to develop a live performance version combining projection, music and spoken word. There is also interest in turning iLive into an interactive installation where viewers can explore the visual universe generated from the poem. The project will continue growing as a hybrid form of poetry, music and digital storytelling.

Built With

• character-design-and-visual-concept-development-kling-ai-for-video-generation-and-animation-runway-for-visual-experimentation-and-refinement-chatgpt-for-narrative-development
• elevenlabs
• kling
• midjourney
• scriptwriting-and-prompt-engineering-photoshop-for-compositing
• suno
• with-no-traditional-programming-languages-or-databases