Full disclosure: I’m running just behind on absolutely all my responsibilities right now due to having the symptoms of an inner ear infection or something. When I’m in that headspace of wanting to crash out for about a week and do nothing but the to-do list is too long and too important for that to be feasible, I just power through whatever I need to do while letting the weirdness of the fatigue “do it’s thing.”
It’s in that head space that I’ve found myself laughing at the extremely weird things that AI can… produce? Or at least automate frame-by-frame?
This video basically took classic meme photos and merged them together to create… visual nonsense that reflects the absurdity of life… AKA, Dadaism.
Years ago, I was saying that meme culture was basically “modern-day Dadaism”. In 2014, I had a Google Chrome plug-in that would change the word “Millennial” to “Snake Person” because the mainstream media was talking about us like we were some kind of alien species that was slowly destroying pretty much everything.
One of my friends responded to “we’re snake people, and our memes are Dadaism” with, “I would call it SnaDa… short for Snake Person Dadaism.”
For some reason, the term “SnaDa” never caught on.
But the creative absurdity has only grown more insane over the last decade, and the invention of AI makes it possible for indie film makers to produce this sort of film:
It’s nonsensical and surreal in style, but still has a plot, a theme, and a meaning to it. The puppets don’t look real, but they look intentionally strange instead of looking like they were spat out by a machine that doesn’t understand what the world is supposed to look like. The world the characters inhabit feels realistic, and the sound effects are all very familiar. In a couple of minutes, “POOF” creates a world and story that feels a bit like “Office Space” meets “The Muppets” meets “Un Chien Andalou” (Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel’s classic surrealist, nonsensical film).
Although “Poof” is primarily AI generated, what makes it a successful, engaging short film to watch is the details that were added in a very intentional, strategic way:
This shows how much human editing will always be necessary for videos to be good quality and resonate with audiences. AI is just one more type of software, not a replacement for human creativity and skills!