AI Video Development Demonstrated Via Music Video
Okay, so, I thought it would be a good idea to show how AI video has developed over the past two years by comparing the music videos I've made with it over the same period.
July, 2024 - Pop-Pop-Bagok!
First real attempt at an AI music video. Clips at the time were short, limited in motion, and low-res, so most of this is stills and editing.
October 1, 2024 - Are You Prepared?
Another that's mostly made with clips from civil defense films and other archive.org scroungings, but clips were getting easier to acquire for free, and could get wilder in the end results. First time I was able to do lip-synch.
October 30, 2024 - Parasaurolophus
As you can likely tell, stuff jumped up quite a bit between October 1st and October 30th, as Parasaurolophus is done entirely with AI base footage. This one was largely if not exclusively an img-to-video project, allowing for the weird creature designs and environmental prettiness.
Clips maxed out around 4-5 seconds at this stage. Anything longer had to be screen-capped from the last frame, then started from that in a new gen and sewn together manually.
It's around here that I got into the Vidu artists' program, and most of what's done here and beyond is with Vidu primarily.
Nov 29, 2024 - (Lets Dance to) Dinowave
We start getting ref-to-video with this one, clips going longer, and strong improvements with coherence. Around this time the systems started being able to handle dinosaurs more consistently, so of course I leapt on it.
Improvements are obvious, what might not be is how much I'm cutting around glitches and errors.
Jan 27, 2025 - An Open Letter to the SCP Foundation
Stock footage is still needed at this stage, as I used it for the typing sections. Reference-to-Video takes a much higher load of the process here, and Director Kleinheart is the first character to be a central focus of the video because consistency reached the point where that was viable.
Still a lot of quick cuts and edits, posters sliding over to hide awkward transitions, etc.
Feb 15 - Rom & Brandy/Ballad of the Spaceknights
A very similar situation to the previous, but with a lot more compositing and post-production work, as on its own the AI leaned too modern in the special effects department so I did them largely myself. For several shots, I generated characters on a greenscreen and composited, a technique that becomes increasingly useful for complex scenes down the line.
April 29, 2025 - Synth Night in 87
still doing manually linked img-to-video to create long shots, this is my first unbroken shot video. Every single one had to be speed adjusted manually as momentum couldn't carry over.
May 10, 2025 - It's Bismuth, Baby
Using the same endless shot technique from Synth Night, for this one I generated each shot, edited it in, and then moved to the next shot, which combined with editing and speed manipulation let me time things out to the song and reproduce something resembling my in-my-head music visualizations in video. A technique I'd use later with "Space Seals"
I timed the clips to end on cymbal clashes as much as possible so I could hide transitions under the visual "jolt" timed with the cymbals.
Skipping to-
October 28, 2025 - Lady of the Maze
This video was my inaugural test of Vidu's character-reference feature in a music video (actual first major use was in After-Cool Action Blok but that's not a music video). This is also the first chance I got to really take advantage of extending shots.
Feb 9, 2026 - If the Goo's Alight, it's Not Alright
Both this and Ain't No Basic Beast were made with the same techniques under the same new Q2-pro & Q3 models. But If the Goo's Alight is more ambitious and has a lot of dialog whereas ANBB has none, so its my use of the 10th video Tumblr allows me.
It's also a good conceptual bookend with Pop-Pop-Bagock, as both are weird sketch ideas that were previously outside my scope and both are meant to be corporate artifacts from a bygone age.
A smidge under 2 years of video model advancement, through the lens of extensive editing and cutting.
I wish I had PPBG's editing file handy, but for reference, this is what the Goo's Alight editing timeline looks like.
So in case it wasn't clear, one thing that remains a myth is the 'push button, get final result' one.
