I was planning on seeing Meshuggah in concert in October and thought it would be cool to produce an original video to share with them when I was there. I had it in my mind for a while that nobody ever releases an official music video for a ten minute long instrumental track, so it was unlikely they had one in the works, and because They Move Below was so epic and mysterious and rife with weird bends and haunting sounds that it would lend itself well to the kind of Lovecraftian visions I have been so inspired to concoct with the AI tools I've been using that it was a natural choice for my subject.
So I set out to make something to hold the attention for the duration and did a ton of renders to get the material for the video. I used timelapse videos of mushrooms growing and landscape panoramas and all kinds of abstract video sources to act as a motion canvas for the AI to feed on. I prompted the system using all kind of alien and biomechanical concepts and a melting pot of my favorite styles and ran several StableWarpFusion based renders.
I then chopped up the results and edited it in the car on my laptop while waiting at my son's little league practice (making some dumb mistakes I had to correct later along the way) and then uploaded it and sent a link to it to Edvard Hansson (Meshuggah's lighting hero) who happened to be sitting near Mårten Hagström (guitar) at the time and after they saw it for like a minute they were immediately writing back saying they loved it and they wanted to make it an official video.
After I recovered from the shock of that I realized I had to fix up some things that were hastily/sloppily done and so took it offline and did some new renders and edits and we iterated together some finishing touches. The end result is a more compelling whole and I couldn't be prouder of the result, even though the whole process of producing this thing was anything but normal. Getting to make this an official video for Meshuggah has been one of the biggest thrills of my life.
Enjoy!
