HOME AGE TO AVALOKITEŚVARA (2023)

So let me tell you about the one where I used AI and archival footage to explore my childhood as a second generation Vietnamese Buddhist!

COLLABORATION with AI image and video generators
Role: Prompt engineering, Script writing, Sound design and recording with Benjamin Ibbotson, Creative Direction, Video editing
Software: RunwayML, DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion

Stepping out of comfort zone: 🌶🌶🌶

To read about my process of integrating AI x AR as a workflow, read about it here and here!

Press: check out my contribution to the AI x Design Community guide on AI images!

HOME AGE TO AVALOKITESVARA is an AI ode to my confusing, nostalgic, grateful connection to Vietnamese and Tibetan Buddhism, and how it has shaped my childhood in more ways that I can seek to understand today. This short film is the crafted narrative of a multicultural Vietnamese-French-British second generation immigrant through the warm, colourful and naive perspective of my youthful spirit.

This short-film is originally an experiment with AI tools for storytelling, and I intend to continue working on this series, I have a lot of notes and starting points in the concepts which I wish to translate visually into a series of AI short films, however I am looking for a collaborator (either filmmaker or creative technologist) to bring these films to life, through looking at alternative processes and perspectives. I have reached a point where I have the overall narrative / concept but I am lacking the full potential to bring these all to life without further minds to help visualise these ideas in more interesting ways than what I have already explored. I want to meet designers whose processes can push this concept, whose own personal understanding of religion can infer the script, and whose technological abilities can uncover new ways of visualising or adding a new layer to the artworks using AI.

At the moment I am mainly using text to image and video generation tools, and some AI-editing softwares in RunwayML, however I want to look at other alternatives, first off, with different techniques of image and video generation, body recognition, movement generation, motion capture, AI-generated sound and other forms of creative code or motion design that isn't necessarily AI-based either such as 3D scanning, photogrammetry, using Unreal Engine and Unity.