ART DIRECTION
When you shut up, you feel,
So shut up,
Shut wide open!
Art direction exercise for YSL Libre, testing an authorial AI pipeline. Dua Lipa's stage wardrobe, reimagined for YSL, left behind on the sand and in the sea at the end of the day. The microphone, the corset, the boots, alone.
PROCESS
First comes editing the idea. It goes on paper or in the rough session with the creative director. Once the composition holds the insight or the brand ambiance, I step onto a pencil + Photoshop rough of the composition (though I am using Krita for its advanced mathematical brushes). Next comes a depth map, and creating all the elements as character sheets: perfume bottle, elements and background. All have to be introduced in high quality for it to output neat results.
Following, a master orchestrator prompt has to be written to make all elements work together. Then it is iteration. A library of errors or near misses is created so we can indicate to the model what it is doing right or wrong. By doing so, a snowball effect begins and we get more and more of what we aspire to.
Even so, the model can, capriciously, not collaborate and give some other result. That is when Photoshop comes in handy to create the final composition. A lot of relighting and retouching will be needed for this to seem proper photography. Lastly, regeneration of the entire composition is necessary to simulate photographic wholeness again.
PROCESS FLOW
DISTILLATION & MIDJOURNEY
Cross-model distillation allows me to explore brand codes at scale. Distillation is a data curation process where I work out the structural dreams and fears of the brand, Keller pyramid and Prism method, plus trajectory. I source from most LLMs and then use a model as a judge, taking out obvious hallucinations. Personal revision comes after: I refine the master document so everything said is accurate to what I see of the brand by regular research. By then I have a database to play on and execute prompts, only based on text.
These prompts were executed in Midjourney.
