Industrial DeepDreaming

Music Video for Band “Years & Years”

Shortly after the release of “DeepDream” in 2015, Roelof Pieters and I independently produced the first two videos exploring animated dreaming. The outputs were fascinating. It lead to the release of custom tools and started a collaboration.

The videos & tools were highly popular online, resulting in an avalanche of requests from directors, agencies and artists — all looking to use deepdream. A particularly interesting request came from director Brian Harrison, asking us to dream a music video for the Band “Years & Years” (Interscope).

Years & Years — Desire (DeepDream Music Video)

Note: Production was done mainly with muted audio due to sanity reasons.

Challenges

During the production process, numerous challenges had to be overcome. Applying deepdream to 2K footage, building custom hardware rigs, designing tools for rapid iteration (deepUI), exploring hyper-parameters and collaborating with directors & corporates— All under time pressure.

The final video is the worlds first industrial scale neural-network based music video. It gives us a glimpse of a future where humans and machines collaborate as equal creative partners. We call this new paradigm creativeAI.

Note to trolls: There are many videos online using deepdream, yes we know (many of them are made using our open source tools). Industrial scale means the first video to be pushed into the global pop market by a major institution.

Impressions