24.12.2024

The project was born out of an initially whimsical gimmick. Axel, bored with the same old futuresque AI look that users flood the relevant image galleries with, experimented with vintage styles. Can AI also create snapshot-like images that are indistinguishable from authentic photos from the 1970s?

Anything is actually possible. You just have to decide that’s what you want. Because, as we all know, the limits are in our heads, not in our toolboxes. So Axel prompted a suitable picture of himself and Alex and sent it to him.

Alex reacted immediately, turned the image into a video using another AI tool and then had the idea of making a “Christmas film” in this way. Axel was thrilled. And now he produced stacks of images showing not only the two founders of Atoll, but also their clients in the clothes and hairstyles of the time. Before Alex breathed life into them. And Axel, in turn, came up with the perfect hook: “Together with our clients, we have achieved so much that the beginning of our collaboration seems like something from another era.”

A few weeks before Christmas, our customers received a mysterious postcard with a QR code and a private link to the finished film. We published a version without clients — just with our faces — on Atoll’s YouTube channel and on LinkedIn.

Workflow

We didn’t create the videos directly, but first created still images, which then served as the basis for moving image sequences. This was the only way we could replace generic heads with those of real people and we also had better control over the desired style.

Midjourney (text-to-image) proved to be enormously powerful for the realisation of our artistic vision. Even so, we needed more than 2000 images before we were satisfied. Picsi took care of the face-swapping, while KlingAI (image-to-video) produced videos that looked more natural than those from competitor Runway and that regularly brought tears of laughter to our eyes and simply blew us away. A total of 600 came together. 31 of them were finally edited within Premiere. For the groovy sound, we first asked Udio (text-to-music) for a few creative suggestions, but then found what we were looking for in the existing hit history and the library of Artlist.