This week, Untitled Frontier minted a collection of NFTs that illustrate my story "Little Martians and the Human Memorial Monument". The artworks come from a collaboration with Gene Kogan, who used his signature neural style transfer over my illustrations, creating abstract textures that are rendered as perfect loops. He also experimented with depth estimation and style transfer transitions, producing longer videos that don't loop. All the works are available on Foundation.
If any of you are interested in experimenting with neural style transfer, you can use Gene's colab notebook (a tool for running code in the cloud). In more formal terms, one can say that style transfer synthesizes 'textures with the style characteristics of an input image, or regenerates one image in the style of another’. So that's how someone can take a photo and make it look like a Van Gogh painting, or create a Van Gogh like abstract work. It's also possible to do style transfer with RunwayML or websites like DeepDream Generator. To play a bit with depth estimation, I recommend watching this video.
In this article I'll present the long process of creating the illustrations. They were made for the children's book I co-authored with my dear friend Claire Parizel, “Diana's World”, published late 2020 in Brazil (my homeland!). It's a book about a girl who travels through world art history with the help of the narrator - a powerful mysterious entity that can open portals connecting the Italian Renaissance, Ukiyo-e Japan, Song China, until the moment when they lose control and Diana finds herself in an M.C. Escher-like space, the fundamental grid beyond time. The first Little Martians story is directly related to “Diana's World", it follows the same story arc but from the perspective of the narrator. It is revealed that our mystery being is an alien, a self-proclaimed Martian, who explains to Diana that she is a simulated human, living inside a memorial where the tales of humanity are forever on display.
The first few pages of Diana's World take place in a tropical forest. Living in Rio de Janeiro, it's very easy to find yourself in a tropical forest. So I'd take my sketchbook with me and do some free style watercolours, starting from the bright colors, then adding greens, reds and blues.
In the story, Diana travels to historical periods that were very influential for human art. All the illustrations were based on original artworks and I painted all on paper. First, I'd create a layout mixing several historical references. It was so much joy to work with Claire Parizel on this, because she's also an art historian (she studied at the Louvre School of Art!), then we could geek out as many references as we wanted to. Creating every drawing on a separate paper and merging them in Photoshop gave me the power to edit the images as many times as needed to improve the storytelling flow. We ended up recreating the book's story as we developed the scenes. The art would guide us to the next phase.
Creating AI animations based on the illustrations gives me the itch to improve my movie making skills. I'd like to create a short film using “Little Martians and the Human Memorial Monument” as a script. The AI interpolations are perfect for a 'traveling through space-time' effect. I wonder if I could refine the neural style transfer movements and transitions, applying more masks and going from one Photoshop layer to another. I guess I need some more After Effects skills as well. But with the knowledge I already have of Adobe Character animator, First Order Motion (an AI character animation model), plus Premiere Pro/ Photoshop/Illustrator, plus Blender, plus Iphone motion capture, plus all the fine arts skills, there's so much I can do! If I keep collaborating with a few more artists, especially people like Gene, Claire and Simon de la Rouviere (my editor from Untitled Frontier), the work reaches new levels. It's becoming much easier to do complex video based storytelling.
If ever you'd like to support this endeavor, you can purchase one of the Little Martians NFTs.
