Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1501110
MUSIC VIDEOS www.postmagazine.com 22 POST MAY/JUNE 2023 Crosslegged — Automatic BROOKLYN, NY — Keba Robinson (AKA Crosslegged) released her second studio album, "Another Blue," on January 27th. Recently, she released a music video for the song "Automatic," which was directed by Sophia Bennett Holmes and Cade Featherstone, who made use of AI technology to animate photos of the artist into uncanny, playful and poetic moving images. "Automatic" is a love song at its core, and the video retains that sense of romanticism as Keba (@crosslegged_) and her clones sing and dance together while trying to woo each other with winks, kisses and flowers. "We fed the software a series of photos we took, which then generated the 20 or so Kebas you see in the video," explain the directing duo. "It was really important in the midst of AI panic to keep on reminding ourselves that it was something we could work with and something that could push us creatively. We also, foolishly, believed it would make for a speedy music video, but actual- ly, it opened up its own set of bizarre challenges that were completely new and took twice as long." Sophia Bennett Holmes made a music video for Crosslegged in 2014, back when they were undergraduates at Cooper Union. With the new album release, Keba Robinson reached out once again to make a video for its first single, "Only In The." For the next single, "Automatic," the collaborators decided to use it as an opportunity to work outside of their past narrative work. "Every different face you see was generated from a different still," explain the filmmakers. "There were probably only around 30 in the final cut, but we had literally hundreds in our folders because it was so difficult to predict how the software would interpret the images." The primary software employed was Deep Nostalgia. "It's part of a site called MyHeritage, which is essentially an ancestry-locating website, but it also has this crazy section where you can feed photos in and it can reanimate them," they explain. "It's for people to see what their ancestors would look like in motion. There's some other AI software floating about that does similar things, but this had a particular strangeness to it that drew us in." Because the Deep Nostalgia technology relies on text input, it was difficult to time the speech to the song's lyrics and tempo. "We tried to match it by spelling things phonetically. For example, a lyric like 'It's cruel' is sung to last over a few bars, but to replicate that, we would have to write, 'It's crooooooooo, ooowowoooo, elllllll.' But even with that, the timing was never perfect, so we did take it into Adobe Premiere Pro to warp the speed to match the song a little more. We also eventually composited all the individual animations in After Effects to produce the final video." Initially, the filmmakers thought AI would relieve them of numerous responsibilities. "It will animate for us, sing for us, green screen for us, and we'll just throw it together," they thought, "but the tasks around that became huge. Learning what input it needed, generating that input, how many photos we had to run through for one to be 'right,' tidying up the mistakes..." The project was produced by @gummyfilms. You can follow the directors on Instagram at @cade_featherstone and @sophiabennettholmes. Glove — Chewing on a Wire TAMPA, FL — Glove (www.glovetheband.com), which released its debut album "Boom Nights" in 2022, just self-directed a music video for their sin- gle "Chewing on a Wire." The band is comprised of Rod Wendt, Brie Deux and Justin Burns, and brings a new-aged sound to British '80s synth pop, hinting to listeners what music might sound like in the future. The video is a mix of artistic visuals and performance footage. Spilled paint, twisted chains and sparse floral arrangements are intercut with imagery of the band playing in front of an industrial building — a pure blue sky overhead. The track's keyboard sequences are layered with blocky "Chewing on a Wire" motion graphics. "Each prop scene was shot in realtime and slow motion," explains Glove's Rod Wendt. "Kyle O'Brien from Motion Minds shot on a Blackmagic (Pocket Cinema Camera) 6K Pro using Sigma lenses, and live, outdoor shots were shot with a Pocket 4K on a gimbal DJI Ronin S3." Color grading was performed using Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve, working with LUTs made by The Brim. Oscar Perez handled the lighting using Aperture Lights. "I edited the video in Premiere Pro and did all the text effects in After Effects," Wendt adds.