Director Romain Gavras on watching AI clone his "Storm" music video

Vulture has a feature on “Storm”, Romain Gavras’s music video for his project Gener8ion with Yung Lean, and what happened after it came out in April.

The centrepiece is a dance by 66 schoolboys, found in a two-month casting search, rehearsed for three days and shot in one unbroken take on 16mm film. Gavras says it took about 15 attempts on a very low budget.

In September, social feeds filled with copies of a half-minute from the video, with the dancers swapped for pets, babies, celebrities and worse. According to Vulture, many were made with Genjutsu, a tool released by Higgsfield in late August that can replace an entire crowd while keeping the original motion and timing.

Gavras told the magazine he found the first ones funny, then sad for the people who worked on the real thing. The piece is a useful read on how motion-transfer tools are changing what counts as an original, and on the line between remixing and copying someone else’s work.