Jocks - Locker Room Chronicles (Video)

Unlike the Back Alley Chronicles, here the focus is on the bond among players of the rugby team. There are lots of hugging and touching, and some more-than-friendly behaviors, but a lot of that are simply implied in their facial expression more than anything else.

I have long found this unspoken bond between men fascinating — this bond which is not only seen amongst gay men, but straight guys also. Often, the amount and level of bromance is so strong that it‘s sometimes hard to distinguish that from gay lovers. That’s partially what I try to explore with these images.

Regarding the blue and white color theme, I blame my extended exposure to blue and white sports uniforms when I was in college. I went to Yale, and the school color is blue and white. I also happened to live right next to the Payne Whitney Gym (the university gym) for three of my four years there, and jocks wearing Adidas blue and white slides and various team uniforms in this exact color scheme were constantly in my sight as I get out for classes in the morning, and walked back home for dinner in the evening. These no doubt made a lasting impression on me, and so when I think about jocks and teams now, my mind naturally goes to blue and white.

There are lots of images in this video, and I’ll be posting them in the coming days.

There are two versions of this video — one slightly longer and in square format, with the 9:16 version edited under a minute for Instagram. I did this because I want the videos to show up under regular videos on YouTube and not in the Shorts section. There are lots of technical information in my description, and it’s easier to read them if it’s displayed in the Videos section instead of shorts. For Twitter, it displays 9:16 format poorly and usually croped, so the square version is needed.

Text prompts in Stable Diffusion, using Virile Animation v1 checkpoint model, 50 steps, Euler a, CFG 5, 768x768, Denoising 0.5, Hires 2x (1536x1536), 15 steps, R-ESRGAN 4x+ Anime6B, ADetailer: face_yolov8n.pt, hand_yolov8n.pt, Post: Gigapixel CG Art 2x (3072x3072), Lightroom color correction, Photoshop touch up. Licensed soundtrack, remixed in Ableton Live Suite, After Effects animation.

Technical Details

Steps: 50
Sampler: Euler a
CFG scale: 5
Size: 768x768
Model hash: 59bcb95ef6
Model: virileAnimation_v10
Denoising strength: 0.5
ADetailer model: face_yolov8n.pt
ADetailer confidence: 0.3
ADetailer dilate/erode: 4
ADetailer mask blur: 4
ADetailer denoising strength: 0.4
ADetailer inpaint only masked: True
ADetailer inpaint padding: 32
ADetailer version: 23.7.2
Hires upscale: 2x (1536x1536)
Hires steps: 15
Hires upscaler: R-ESRGAN 4x+ Anime6B
Version: v1.3.2
Post: Gigapixel CG Art 2x (3072x3072)
Post: Lightroom color correction
Soundtrack: Licensed source, remixed in Ableton Live Suite
Animation: After Effects

Rugby Series

Sports photography has always captivated me. The energy, the vigor, the masculine display of strength. Sometimes, during a match, the athletes would get into these positions which are seemingly gay. This is what I tried to reproduce with these generations.