Irish director Ruairi Robinson follows up his AI-generated meditation on the horrors of war for Steve Moore's The Blue Stone with a sequel, taking his experiments with available generative AI technology even further.

Robinson's starting point is the Rudyard Kipling anit-war poem Boots, and in this case he has created the song, its performer and the visuals entirely through generative AI. There is a female artist lipsyncing the song in the midst of a full-scale war in modern LA between human soldiers and 3D anime monsters.

The result is surreal - but also thoroughly convincing in terms of a cinematic viewing experience. It's another impressive (and arguably disturbing) leap forward in the possibilities of AI-based creation, particularly with its lipsyncing avatar. And Robinson has clearly worked very hard with that technology in order to achieve his objective. 

"The song was generated using suno," explains Robinson. "I created a persona to make a girl that sings Synthwave music, and fed her the lyrics of the Kipling poem to sing. After a few hundred iterations this was a result I really liked. I’m not a musician, but I’d rather listen to music that’s entirely fake than generic autotune corporate content, so me doing this is a last resort. 

"The girl doesn’t exist either. She was generated in veo 2 and I used images of her to generate further footage of her talking using image to video with kling to then use this generated footage to train a lip-sync model.

"The video was produced during a two week 16 hour a day fever dream, first, a week of generating shots using veo 2 and editing, then a week of trying to make the lip sync work and doing fixes in post in After Effects and Da Vinci Resolve. Veo 2 has trouble creating consistent characters since it’s text to video so I had to swap her face in some shots to help maintain character consistency."