4 films
2023
AIandDesign
A distillation of the Gen-2 aesthetic. Euphoria doesn't fight the tool's psychedelic drift — the way forms bloom and dissolve mid-shot, textures breathe, and subjects melt into the next. It leans into it and treats that instability as the visual language rather than an artifact to be hidden. AIandDesign built a sustained piece out of the drift itself, closer to a music-video reverie than a narrative short — the strongest surviving argument that the early models had an aesthetic of their own, not just a set of limitations.
"I want to believe." A ninety-second UFO reverie made in response to the July 2023 congressional whistleblower hearing on aliens — news commentary turned around in the same news cycle, which almost nobody could do before these tools. Midjourney stills driven through Runway Gen-2 and cut in CapCut. Gen-2's melting, half-formed quality is a liability in most subjects and an asset in this one.
Four minutes of pure Gen-2 id. AIandDesign typed the name of deoxy.org — a bizarre psychedelic website he'd stumbled onto in the early 1990s, still online today — into Runway Gen-2 as a text prompt and, in his words, let it rip with the motion cranked to 10. No storyboard, no stills, no intervention: a single phrase handed to the model as an instruction to hallucinate. He describes the result as an acid trip back to his all-nighter rave past, and it doubles as an accidental record of what Gen-2 did when nobody steered it.
A near-three-minute music video built from Midjourney stills animated in Runway Gen-2 and assembled in CapCut — the entire Gen-2-era toolchain, all of it consumer-priced. Cyberpunk is the era's most-attempted genre for a reason: neon, rain, and chrome are exactly what a model trained on the internet renders best, and the style's own grammar absorbs the drift and flicker that would sink a naturalistic shot.