I had a creative vision for a piece of music I put together a while back for my musical moniker The Red Green & Blue. In it the Hindu god Shiva is seen rising from a desolate and barren landscape to restore life, semblance and order to the cosmos. No small feat.
In order to achieve this vision I used a variety of tools. Midjourney was fundamental in generating still images which were then modified using Photoshop to create the desired frames. These frames were then fed back into Midjourney and Kling AI to generate animated clips, which were cut together using Adobe Premiere, where I added camera movements and final touches.
One of the main challenges was to create a cohesive look and feel across the board, ensuring that Shiva looks more or less consistent throughout. I was blown away by some of the more three dimensional looking scenes and equally frustrated but the number of shaky and unusable results generated. It was a journey that took around three weeks in total with much trial and error along the way.
I was also inspired by the mythology and symbolism of Shiva: the crescent moon on the head that represents the cyclical nature of time, the cobra around the neck as a symbol of power and fearlessness, and Mount Kailash, Shiva’s divine abode, seen in the final scenes of the animation.
Shiva is simultaneously both a destructive and creative force, which is what I wanted to embody with this piece. It is perhaps fitting and somewhat ironic, that the tools used to make this video are predominantly AI based: a technology that offers enormous creative potential but one that is inherently destructive by nature in it’s vast energy consumption and displacement of more traditional art forms.
