What is the Reason For It? - David Byrne

Inspiration

The inspiration was David's archive of drawings. We loved the drawings, but they lacked movement. We wanted to bring them to life to create a video for David's new track "What Is The Reason For It?"

What it does

Makes you smile and want to dance!

How we built it

David Byrne’s What Is The Reason For It gave Dustin Yellin and Art Official the opportunity to merge David’s simple, hand-drawn sketches with cutting-edge generative AI tools, bringing the song to life visually. Artist Ricardo Villavicencio led the film’s creative direction, blending his talent in animation, storytelling, and AI for the project.

Dustin worked closely with David to shape the characters and story arc, while Ricardo and Nick St. Pierre defined the AI animation approach.

Using a stack of generative AI tools, a small creative team animated David’s drawings, ensuring every movement aligned with Dustin and David’s vision. Through Ricardo's mixed-media direction, they combined new-school AI animation with old-school techniques, reassembling the sequence from printed frames and embracing glitches and errors as reflections of human work.

Challenges we ran into

Black on white line drawings, are extremely hard to animate with AI. The models often distorted and altered the images we gave it. For what seems simple, took a lot of hours experimenting and fine tuning.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A full music video, animated entirely with AI.

What we learned

Sometimes the simplest goals are the hardest to achieve with AI.

What's next for What is the Reason For It? - David Byrne

Hopefully some big views on Youtube and maybe an award!

Built With

• kling
• krea
• midjourney
• runway
• seedance
• veo