Electric Pink is a short film by Henry Daubrez created for Google's annual developer conference Google I/O where they introduced a new AI filmmaking tool, Flow.
Learn more about the project here.
“For a brain that’s been mainlining animation and questionable VHS tapes since forever, that kind of freedom is both a dream and a mild panic attack. To be honest, until recently I never really thought film making was in the cards for me. Life happened, and although I ended up being a designer, film was more of a distant dream of a young version of myself.
Following the unexpected attention and warm reception for Kitsune earlier this year, Electric Pink came out as my own self-administered therapy session: a coming-of-age story that’s basically me trying to figure out my own creative wiring, from the fuzzy nostalgia of childhood to the full-on HD chaos of the present.Turns out, the path to making stuff is paved with a lot of self-doubt and sudden left turns. I’m hoping this film can build on the connection Kitsune fostered.
For this project, focused on exclusively using a lengthy process involving leveraging Imagen 3 to create the base of still frames (Imagen was amazing at iteratively enabling me to lock art direction) which I would then heavily retouch and prepare to get them as perfect as needed. Then each scene would be run through VEO2 to get animated clips based on those images (and then a very obvious bunch of sound design, voice design, editing, post-production and what not).
Now, what’s been amazing as I was nearing the end of this project, is to see individual separate tools converge towards becoming “Flow”: Google’s AI filmmaking tool built on DeepMind’s brilliant tools (Veo, Imagen, Gemini). I must say it’s been fascinating seeing how this tech can translate the random noise in my head into something… well, film-like.
It felt like a real step forward in allowing creators to iterate and refine their vision without getting bogged down in organization, and for example having an opportunity to use a first-frame to last-frame interpolation proved to be extremely useful as I could fully control the action I was aiming for.”
