Boards of Canada vs Deforum Stable Diffusion
November 21, 2022 8:20 AM   Subscribe

A HD fan video for audiotrack 12 from the Random 35 Tracks Tape from the mid-90s (historical detail). The same choir-like vocal can be briefly heard on Aquarius (version 3). Previously on Stable Diffusion; alternative fan video. Texts used in generation below the fold...

From the YouTube video description, the prompts used:

"0": "ONE POINT PERSPECTIVE DUNGEON ROOM, painted by Edward Gorey and Moebius and Greg Rutkowski and Paul Wenzel and George Barr and Stephen Youll,trending on artstation, iridescent cool blue and cyan and red and blue and yellow and green lighting front view futuresynth , outrun , vibrant colors, Sabattier filter , Watercolor",
"200": "Colored pencil and pen drawing of a pheonix, made of colorful mechanical parts, octane render, high resolution",
"400": "happy frog, full body photo, flames everywhere, highly detailed, digital painting, artstation, concept art, smooth, sharp focus, illustration, art by artgerm and greg rutkowski and alphonse mucha",
"600": "google maps satellite image of a magical discworld with many continents like a pokemon sword and shield map, high resolution",
"800": "diesel punk city, first person view, fps, unreal engine, octane render",
"1000": "traditional drawn colorful animation a car solo stranger with sad face pacing to valley symmetrical architecture on the ground, space station planet afar, planet surface, ground, flower, outer worlds extraterrestrial hyper contrast well drawn Metal Hurlant Pilote and Pif in Jean Henri Gaston Giraud animation film The Masters of Time FANTASTIC PLANET La planète sauvage animation by René Laloux",
"1200": "an utopic portrait of a retrofuturistic assassin in front of advanced architecture. highly detailed science fiction, rich colors, high contrast, gloomy atmosphere, dark background. trending on artstation an ultrafine hyperdetailed colorfull illustration by kim jung gi, moebius, irakli nadar, alphonse mucha, ayami kojima, amano, greg hildebrandt, syd mead and mark brooks, female, feminine, art deco, new baroque, intricate linework, colors by frank frazetta",
"1400": "city mirror image in the sky, hyper real, 8k, colorful, 3D cinematic volumetric light, atmospheric light, studio ghibli inspired, fantasy LUT, high contrast, epic composition, sci-fi, dreamlike, surreal, angelic, by Moebius,",
"1600": "a concept of a detailed and intricate design of a mechanical deconstructor 3 d design, great finesse organic hyper detailed, engineering blueprints, technical drawings, calculus, stained paper,",
"1800": "a comic potrait of a cyberpunk cyborg girl with black and red parts, fine - face, realistic shaded perfect face, fine details. night setting. very anime style. realistic shaded lighting poster by ilya kuvshinov katsuhiro, unreal engine, global illumination, radiant light, detailed and intricate environment",
"2000": "a polaroid photo of an 8 0 s party after dark",
"2200": "strange baptism, decay, ritual, full moon, plague, 1 0 0 0 best album covers, highly detailed, wide angle, beksinski, bradley, otherworldly, andre le notre, psychedelic",
"2400": "exquisite imaginative imposing weird creature movie poster art humanoid anime movie art by : : james jean weta studio tom bagshaw frank frazetta studio ghibli",
"2600": "a weird place full of people but now empty with eerie feeling, disposable colored camera, camera flash, house, mall, hallway, playground, office, pool, interior, room, full of things ",
"2800": "an old wooden hikers shack in the woods next to a beautiful medium sized lake, early morning light, spring, ufo hovering in the sky retracting a cow from a field with an anti gravity beam, painting by kenton nelson ",
"3000": "european farm, summer, open wide, epic, cinematic, elegant, highly detailed, featured on artstation",
"3200": "a landscape painting of an old farm house and a windmill in the countryside, old wooden fencing, autumn, painting by kenton nelson, dusk light, nice sunset, autumn leaves blowing off trees in the wind ",
"3400": "a landscape painting of a house, farm, moonlight, winter, starts, atmospheric, mystical, very detailed 4 k ",
"3600": "a breathtakingly stunningly beautifully highly detailed extreme close up portrait of a raven, a rock arch overhead framing shot, epic coves crashing waves plants, beautiful clear harmonious composition, dynamically shot, wonderful strikingly vivid orange beautiful dynamic sunset with epic clouds, detailed organic textures, by frederic leighton and rosetti and turner and eugene von guerard, 4 k ",
"3800": "beautiful oil painting, full length portrait of dauphinois in baroque coronation robes 1701, Dan Mumford, Dan Mumford, Alex grey, highly detailed , lsd visuals, dmt fractal patterns, hallucinogen, visionary art, psychedelic art, ornate, vaporwave, baroque, Greg rutkowski"
posted by Wordshore (8 comments total) 18 users marked this as a favorite
 
Amazing...
posted by senor biggles at 9:04 AM on November 21, 2022 [1 favorite]


Psychedelic music like BoC seems particularly well-suited to machine hallucination. But I find myself quite conflicted about stuff like this. If you had told me this was hand drawn by a person I’d have been bowled over, but as it is I find it beautiful and interesting but also… somehow, it just makes me feel sad.
posted by disentir at 9:37 AM on November 21, 2022 [1 favorite]


Give it time. Remember the silly and awkward state of CGI in the 80s? And then all of a sudden, Pixar.
posted by credulous at 11:31 AM on November 21, 2022 [3 favorites]


Is there a lossless version of this somewhere? I feel like 90% sure it's generating encoding artifacts but it's really hard to tell, since I think this kind of thing is difficult for codecs in the first place.
posted by wesleyac at 7:09 PM on November 21, 2022


@wesleyac you can change the settings to 1080p, but these things are generated at 512x512 (or 762x512 in this case) and are upscaled to high def.

And as someone who has spent way too much time using txt2img and training diffusion models and understands (somewhat) how they work, the fact that they work at all is pretty amazing in itself.

The artist here undoubtedly spent a lot of time refining the prompts, and the keystep notation needed to control the camera panning alone is a significant portion of the work. Keep in mind also that rendering 30 seconds of video could take hours, so lots and lots of trial and error are required.
posted by daHIFI at 7:39 PM on November 21, 2022


There are a bunch of these on YouTube, and many of them have detailed notes on how they were produced, like this one. Lots of temporal and spatial upscaling.
posted by credulous at 8:34 PM on November 21, 2022


Remember the silly and awkward state of CGI in the 80s? And then all of a sudden, Pixar.
Exactly! That’s the part that makes me sad. This software is a tool that promises to let users skip a lot of the toil involved in the generation of digital art. The conveniences of this approach could eventually displace digital art done any other way.

There is a human artist in the loop on this video. They made choices about prompts and timing, and they curated the outputs of the AI model. And tomorrow, they could generate a very different looking video using the exact same prompts and timing. If the artist had instead created their original video by hand drawing it, it would have been a monumental task that does not bear repeating because every object in it would have resulted from a conscious creative decision executed via manual skill.

I enjoy making digital art and so have some idea of what is involved in trying to realize a creative vision using conventional software. I’ve also tinkered with Stable Diffusion. To me the process of prompting and curating, while often entertaining and surprising, doesn’t feel the same as drawing and sculpting. Maybe the tools are just still too crude to allow gestalt. Or maybe I’m just frustrated because the output of the computer model often surpasses my own skill while also not being anything like what I had in mind.
posted by disentir at 11:05 PM on November 21, 2022 [1 favorite]


Something in the same vein, to tide us over until the forthcoming Boards of Canada album is finally finished and released: Name the BoC track. A daily game (now finished) where you can try and name the Boards of Canada track title based on pictures generated by the AI engine MidJourney.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/NameTheBocTrack
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/name_the_boc_track/
posted by Wordshore at 2:39 PM on November 25, 2022


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