[Not] Coming Home

Inspiration

My own life experience as a both physically disabled and neurodivergent person, and obvervations of the world around me on how society treats those who do not fit. And the depressing post-soviet country architecture and aestetics that always surrouded me.

What it does

It is a music video that shows the inner world of the outcasts, people who are rejected by society for being different - be it disability, appearance, personality, or worldview. They look at the world around them and see how it is drowning in violence and lies. They try to reach out for people, but are met with indifference, because people like them are not wanted or needed. All that remains is to wander around this cold world in search of a home that does not exist.

How we built it

With the help of some cutting-edge AI's that are listed in the description. First, I wrote the text for the song and generated the song. Then I made idea for the story in my head. After that I generated the character, and started placing him in the environments I needed for this video, and then I animated those and put everything together.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the scenes required a lot of prompt modifications to animate properly. Many ideas undergo total changes due to being impossible to properly animate them. Also, many AI's straight off refused to animate certain scenes like the graffiti one, and I had to find the specific one that won't have such restrictive moderation.

I was thinking a lot of where to put this submission, but, just like its main character - it does not fit anywhere. It is sort of a ballad, but it's not heavy enough to fit into the rock section, and it barely has any guitar to justify being in this genre. It is also not lively enough to be a pop, and it is clearly not electronic or rnb. I think that the closest genre for it is "adult contemporary" - special genre that mixes a bit of everything else, but since you do not have such catherogy, I decided to put it into "open" one.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

How many different aspects i could animate in certain sections, without compromising the overall quality. How I managed to blend the video with the flow of the song, and how the atmosphere turned out to be exactly what I wanted to show. My personal favorite moment is the carousel scene, I call it "peak of post-soviet happiness", and the howling vocalize that supports it, where despair and acceptance mix together - perfectly portrays the mood of the scene.

What we learned

Advanced prompt engineering.

What's next for [Not] Coming Home

Hopefully finding a way to share it with people, so they could see the perspective of those whose voices are usually ignored by the society.

Built With

• dreamina
• google
• grok
• saga
• suno