Behind the scenes of Director Paul Trillo’s campaign for GoFundMe “Help Changes Everything”

The innovative film production combined a live action shoot on a soundstage, where Trillo used a bespoke AI rotoscoping method for characters enhancing motion-based scenes to clearly shift from a negative to positive light, in order to represent the impact of donations and communities being transformed.

Using a both Dall-E and Stable Diffusion for composite layers of visual assets with a hand-painted aesthetic, this project is a bold first from a major brand to take a leap of faith and base their large-scale campaign on AI-generative art.

Paul Trillo on the Future of AI

We are in a paradigm shift in the industry with the recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence image generation. Director Paul Trillo has been a pioneer in this space and AI has shifted his perspective on how to approach filmmaking. Dall-E 2, Stable Diffusion and Runway offer the ability to create the impossible. This allows not only to do things faster but also opens up the door to entirely new visual concepts. These tools will forever change how we approach visual effects and we are just at the cusp of what’s possible.

“From painterly surrealism to hyper detailed photorealism, AI can be used to efficiently generate your dreams. It can be used to invent backdrops to an alternate reality, concept artwork for a film shoot or even spur design inspiration. It may be intimidating and even scary, but I believe the only way to move forward is to embrace the innovation and see what new visual devices we may discover. My own work has shifted to embrace the impossible.” Director Paul Trillo

Object Replacement

Using Dall-E to replace objects within a live action video, Director Paul Trillo has taken any object (no matter how big or how small) and inserted it into a scene with photorealistic qualities with just a few clicks.

Style Transfer

Style transfer takes an input image or video and reconstructs it from to ground up to create an entirely new animation. Whether img2img or Gen1, this is an entirely new way of thinking about animation.

Generative Animation

While style transfer, takes an source input image or video and reinterprets it, generative animation is based completely on AI generated source material. Deforum is a tool that allows you to take a text prompt and continually iterate on it with additional parameters that can be manipulated over time. This leads to slightly more experimental and less controlled outputs.

Other Techniques

AI can do so much more from creating photoreal 3D environments with NeRFs, automated rotoscope, removing objects from a scene with the click of a button, generative 3D objects, infinite zooms, to generative video with GEN-1, it’s the combination of these tools that becomes truly powerful. Discover more examples of Director Paul Trillo’s work below.