25.09.2023

We shot several films with amateurs who had never been in front of the camera for advertising before. Their performances were so great that we wanted to thank them in a special way.

At the film premiere and launch of our “supergut” campaign, we presented the actors and actresses with very personal cinema posters bearing their likenesses. After all, with their commitment to biodiversity, they are nothing less than superheroes. The surprise was a success and the old cinema in Vaduz resounded with exuberant laughter.

What exactly did we do?

We had the AI tool Midjourney generate heroic portraits, which initially worked quite well. Because what it has already seen millions of times — in our case film posters — generative AI reproduces seemingly effortlessly.

But it wasn’t quite that simple after all.

We had visualisations in mind that would parody different genres but also reflect the content of our own films. Until text-to-image systems even come close to doing what you want, it takes many attempts and thus quickly several hours for a single poster motif. Prompting is like mouth painting with a metre-long brush: You don’t have the control you’re used to as a creative professional.

After we were finally satisfied with the epic basic images, the random faces shown on them had to be replaced by those of our actors. We dragged photos of them from publicly accessible internet sources into a face swap plugin for this purpose.

But now the problems really began.

If the fictitious person in the base image does not correspond fairly closely to the physiognomy of the real-life person, the former distorts the latter beyond recognition.

We had to work with crazy workaround prompts to ensure that Midjourney didn’t always feature women with plunging cleavages and long necks or mature men with white beards. That “garden work” doesn’t mean a person working on a PC in a greenhouse. And trying to get the AI to produce a usable scythe or shovel was really hopeless.

At least these unwanted artefacts — alien-like limbs included — were entertaining and worth seeing in their own way.