i’ve always loved the Matrix. The first movie has a special place in my heart. I saw it in theaters when it came out, knowing absolutely nothing about it. I was blown away.
So naturally as AI tools started becoming more and more accessible, I decided to see what AI would do with the Matrix.
Specifically, I rendered out 1500 frames from the movie as stills, and trained an AI on that dataset. The imagery it produced wasn’t that interesting. So I tried a few more AI approaches.
I’ve had this problem before when training AI models on large datasets of non-similar imagery. It sort of breaks. It doesn't really know what kind of imagery i’m looking for, so the results are messy.
A similar thing can happen when the dataset is too small. It picks one or two images and keeps repeating them. Neither of those things are what I want.
AI generated morph
The next tool I tried was an AI model called Looking Glass. Looking Glass works by taking an image, or group of images as input, and then generated variations of those from its pre-trained datasets. The stuff it creates can be pretty out there.
Aaaand that wasn’t much better. You can tell what it’s trying to do, but it keeps missing the mark.
That’s ok, i’ve got a few more AI tricks up my sleeve. Next is Disco Diffusion.
Now we’re getting weird! Disco Diffusion also has a mode to create video, by moving through an image and continuously putting it through the algorithm. So I fed it a still frames and let it do its thing.
The Matrix has you
This idea has potential. I definitely want to experiment with more still frames, and see how weird things can get. But this one takes the longest. Usually I have to leave it overnight and check it in the morning. So I had one more AI tool to try before bed: Midjourney.
At first, Midjourney was giving me results that were “too good”. Or rather, too close to the source material. It started to look like the Matrix, just re-cast.
So I decided to add some other terms to the prompt. “Retro mod illustration” got me this:
I kind of love this direction! This kind of output makes me feel like exploring my own illustration in this style. There’s a lot more I think I can do with this concept of sending still frames from my favorite movies through AI. And there’s a lot of different styles I can explore with the help of AI. This kind of stuff really excites me.
Maybe Fight Club next?