Pink Floyd: Dark Side of The Moon | A 50th Anniversary Animated Tribute by Eki & AI |
Eki asked me if I knew PINK FLOYD. I got all puffed up and said, ‘DUH’. And added, ‘but I don’t know HIS music’. Eki jumped in with a withering, ’it’s a group, not a person’. And said, for the 50th anniversary of ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ they invited AI prompt engineers to illustrate the album.
A huge task but right up Eki’s alley. He sent me the link to ’The Wall’. And told me Pink Floyd had a huge influence on him as a kid. When he saw i 'The Wall' as a young teen he decided ‘movies and music’ were what he wanted to do when he grew up. He stuck with it and made it happen.
To illustrate the old album using AI was a brilliant way for the iconic group to celebrate the Golden anniversary. And give fans a way to to take part in the project. Eki sent me a link to his AI illustrated album. When I asked people about Pink Floyd, who were around Eki ’s age, they zeroed in on ‘The Wall’. But when I talked to a GenZ guy, he knew Pink Floyd was famous, but he liked ‘Arctic Monkey’. Time marches on. But Pink Floyd found a way to make their 50 year old ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ new again. Hats off!
Sources: Eki, internet, interviews
Next week: Please say YES! Will MICHELLE OBAMA run or PRESIDENT 2024?
Note:
To be more specific, it's an animation competition: the rules do allow the use of AI, but do not require it. Also, the task was to create an animated video for any song from the album - or more. It was my own decision to go full monty and try to come up with videos for every song, the whole album.
And that decision was made because of the emergence of AI - doing the work manually would have been practically impossible, due to the sheer amount of animation needed. So, i not only created the majority of images with AI, i also created the majority of the hundreds of needed text prompts with AI. As well as some custom code needed to make it all work.
This said, there was a lot of manual work involved too - 3D and 2D animation, editing, compositing etc. I chose to attempt a hand-drawn style, something that would have been theoretically possible in the 1970s if they had unlimited budget. So even the 3D animation elements were pushed through AI processing for the hand-drawn look.
To me, this was largely a testing ground for the AI tools - a reason to spend time learning them and pushing them to the limit. The judges are still out making decisions about the winners, but to me, the trip itself was the goal. Getting awarded would of course be a nice bonus, but considering the high number of participants and the high quality of many entries, a quite unlikely one.
PS: Maggy's little blunder about the identity of Pink Floyd is not an uncommon one. In fact, Pink Floyd themselves have made fun of the misconception, e.g. in the lyrics of "Have a Cigar", where the record label executive asks them "Oh, by the way, which one is Pink?".
PS2: I was 5 years old when The Dark Side Of The Moon came out - a little too little to pay attention. But when The Wall was released about a decade later... I've been a fan of the band ever since, and the ground-breaking animations in The Wall feature film were one of the reasons why I pursued a career in the film/animation/VFX industry, along with the more usual suspects like ILM:s work on Star Wars, Raiders etc. They were indeed creating magic, and I wanted to do that too.
CU
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Eki
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