Niklas Walg, a student of the Time-Based Media degree program at Mainz University of Applied Sciences, has won the category for Artificial Intelligence at the renowned advertising film festival in Stuttgart. His award-winning music video, which was created in the “Music Video Conception and Production” class under the supervision of Prof. Daniel Seideneder, invites viewers to delve into the fascinating creative worlds of artificial intelligence.
In his project “Water World”, Niklas Walg deals with the exciting and useful integration of artificial intelligence into storytelling. “It was important to me to show how AI is gaining in relevance today,” he explains. The concept of the video is based on an endless loop in which a person repeatedly notices strange things and reacts to them. The main character’s face can be seen briefly at the beginning and end of the video. “I immediately thought of ‘glitches’ in connection with AI.”
The first tests were performed with various video-to-video AI websites and programs, but did not lead to the desired result. “Everything looked too much like AI,” says the student. So he decided to work with individual frames. "I edited the filmed frames in Photoshop by selecting certain areas and adding AI generation. I repeated this process several times and thought about the best way to tell the story.”
For the second part of the video, Walg used Kaiber.AI, a program that helped him incorporate more transformations in the video. “These transformations always took place in time with the music to keep the video exciting,” he explains. Towards the end, the protagonist is completely taken over by the AI and once again shows his face.
The innovative “Water World” project impressively demonstrates how artificial intelligence can be used creatively to open up new dimensions in storytelling. The award at the Spotlight advertising film festival in Stuttgart is well-deserved recognition for such outstanding work.
Watch the music video here:
https://youtu.be/qP4rvag64zE?si=NBPcaGOIcNKfFFIw
