Diva Navi

Diva NA.vI. Or “The fake story of the fake find of the fake film never shot (for fake) based on a true story of an imaginary boat… and how all this has become reality”

Today I’ll tell you about a fun project made for a director friend. Years ago he wrote a short story, linked to an artistic installation, which Gaia translated first and then we turned into a very suggestive show, which some of you have even seen. The first version was made in an unconsecrated church… with my first videomapping experiment…

The story was about an icebreaker ship that faces different adventures (I simplified it a lot but the story, like all Alain’s works, is surreal and very very beautiful and suggestive, like the installation he made linked to this story).

10 years later (today) Gaia and I enjoyed using some AI to pick up this story.

The idea was that of a (fake) find of the material related to a (fake) film made in the first half of the 20th century by a Hungarian director and never (definitely) completed for mysterious reasons.
First we made ChatGPT read parts of the story, then asked him to imagine the story of the production of this film, who was the director, the producer and the main actors.

We then asked him to write an article in English for a magazine (1960s) in which we talk about the discovery of part of the material shot in this film, some scene photos taken during the work and the production diary handwritten by the director.

We therefore asked ChatGPT to tell us why the production had mysteriously stopped and to write this story in the form of pages of a diary (complete with dates) written in the first person by the director. The text, written in French, was then handwritten by Gaia on sheets using a fountain pen, with parts deliberately made illegible simulating damage from water and moisture (it would have been found after years in fact …).

At this point the production of the images begins.

From the front we simply asked Midjourney to create “vintage” photos of a crew shooting an ice movie, even filming maybe some models of the icebreaker ship.

Then we asked ChatGPT to describe the main characters and used that description with Midjourney to make photos of the (fake) cast.

Also with MJ we created images of a hypothetical storyboard, then animated with Deforum on Stable Diffusion and visible in augmented reality framing the storyboard drawings.
And in the end we asked ChatGPT to tell us about the scenes from the film and then describe them as if they were still images of a film. These descriptions were used with MJ to create the movie images.

We then printed in typography the pages of the fake magazine in which the discovery of the material was announced (tearing and ruining them a little), we linked the pages of the (fake) diary by hand, and had the more than 50 accompanying images printed.

The whole thing was put in a box with, in addition, even a real telegraph device found in a modern air shop… “was it the one used to shoot some scenes on the ship??”

This is the first time we have used these AIs for such an articulated project but the result has been remarkable.

ChatGPT has baked some interesting stories
Sime, rich in detail and disturbing. Also finding analogies with references to the real story that we had NOT passed on to him.

And MJ + SD created remarkable images that, once printed in photo format, were very very convincing.
Keep in mind that the surreal style of the story and the director to whom we gave this work, allow you to “push” over the lines, which is why strange tools are used in the photos of the cast, and the sets are deliberately excessive and without a real temporal connotation.

What will become of all this? Well… this may be the story for a future project.