Gather
Gather - men coming together, mingling, joining, connecting, converging.
I have always wanted to do photography at a grand scale, involving hundreds and thousands of models, and photographing them from the sky. I wanted to have a print that covers the entire wall — that from a distance, you get a macro view of the entire composition, but that it has such fine detail that you can walk up close and see the individual figures.
Needless to say, that never happened. A production at this scale would be overly involved — besides having to set up everything and find a place large enough to hold so many individuals, the production costs associated with such an idea would be unimaginably expensive.
But then AI happened. I have used my time to explore what could be done with the technology in small steps, working on random ideas just for the fun of it. I wanted to find out everything that I could do with the engines, so that I could command it at will to do what I really wanted to do. In AI, truly, you’re only limited by your imagination.
This collection of images and video is a sketch of what I eventually wanted to create with actual human models. It’s a sketch, and I know that some of the images are not perfect, but as a sketch, it’s the concept that matters. I hope that some day I would be able to do this in real life. I know it’s crazy, but one can dream.
The original sketch was made a couple of months ago with Midjourney v5 — when it was still possible to get figures without shirts. The ones with men wearing color shirts are from v5.2 when it’s no longer possible. Originally I really disliked them, but then I wanted to add some visual progression in the beginning of the video, and they came in really handy.
Text prompts with Midjourney v5.2. Topaz Gigapixel HQ 4x upscale. After Effects aniamtion. Licensed music, remixed in Ableton Live Suite.