In this curious and enigmatic video for “Silk Sheets” by DJ/producer Eben Tenner, German director Michael Fragstein tempers the endless possibilities of AI with a carefully curated mix of stop-motion and collage techniques.

Michael Fragstein: “The main task in this project was to find the sweet spot, where you have great variety between the single frames without losing the visual continuity. One important factor was the weighting between influence of the AI prompt and visual impact. All of the 3000 frames created for this project were manually adjusted and exported one at a time.
 

“Since I’m a huge fan of old surrealistic East European animation pioneers, I wanted to give the production a vintage hand made stop-motion vibe.”

 
“With the integration of AI-generated content in our workflow, sometimes it is more difficult connect to our own visual output, especially when the workflow is highly automated. By embracing this time consuming stop-motion technique for this video, I was rewarded with the feeling that these pictures ‘belong’ to me because they are based on many conscious decisions.

“Since I’m a huge fan of old surrealistic East European animation pioneers, I wanted to give the production a vintage hand made stop-motion vibe. I was experimenting with frame rates and 12 fps seemed to work best in that context.”
 
 

 
Artist: Eben Tenner

Production: Büro Achter April
Director: Michael Fragstein