Director duo Grin Machine - that's Dan Streit and Cole Kush - create a mind-boggling promo for A$AP Rocky, combining tropes of hip hop videos - including Rocky's - with high concept Nineties comedy Weekend At Bernie's, delivered in the directors' wildly experimental comedic style.  

Released in collaboration with EA’s new videogame Need For Speed: Unbound, the video for Shittin' Me opens with Rocky at the height of his career, barking orders at office employees.

But after an unfortunate crowd-surfing incident, Rocky collapses and dies. So his entourage then embark on various methods to keep the Rocky bandwagon/gravy train on the road.

This involves their desparate attempts to puppeteer Rocky's lifeless body (as per Bernie's, and the DANIELS' debut feature Swiss Army Man) but eventually they revert to building a new, almost-realistic version of Rocky to replace the old. And hope nobody notices - even though he seems quite a lot nicer than the original Rocky.

This gives full reign to Streit and Kush's leftfield aesthetics in a breathless blur of frenetic, AI-enhanced visuals. The whirlwind of imagery and textures create a hypnotic, almost out-of-body experience, and builds to a climax of haunting vignettes that look vomited up straight from the Uncanny Valley. 

“It was this weird and beautiful situation where Rocky had no notes and was fully on board to try out anything with our bizarre narrative.,” explain the Grin Machine pair. "We’re super grateful for that." 

The directors took an atypical approach to their unique production design, curating some set decoration and using AI tools to build upon the setups on the three day shoot. Streit and Kush handles all the editing and VFX themselves, implementing experiments from various AI tools including Stable Diffusion, Dall-E 2, RunwayML, amongst others.

“We set out to make something that somewhat combined a goofy 80’s-90’s comedy movie narrative, told through a bizarre and frenetic mashup of experimental AI visuals, while still treating it as a 'cool rap video'. We HOPE we have succeeded with this!”