Award-winning music video
Losing You
Rachel Claudio’s song about attachment and the subconscious, slowed to 800 frames per second with neural networks.
- Year
- 2021
- Where
- Festivals in Rome, Berlin, Venice and Vienna
- Our role
- Direction, AI post-production
- Discipline
- Film
Rachel Claudio and we saw the same picture from the first preview of the song: deep underwater, a dark scene, a far distant body, super slow. The footage from the shoot was the opposite — fast, bright and close. Classic techniques could not bridge the gap, so we turned to neural networks.
01Water as the unconscious
“Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious.” The song is about how attachment set up in the first years of life quietly steers our relationships — how the subconscious protects us with the familiar, even when the familiar hurts.
02Teaching a machine to see underwater
We slowed the best shots from 50 to 600–800 fps. No professional video software gave good results, and no pre-trained underwater model existed — so we used a model trained on off-road rally footage: flying dust and stones behave remarkably like bubbles.
To pull the camera back, we segmented the body with YOLACT++, pushed its detection error so high that the AI started seeing things that are not there — as our minds do — and used those masks to cut the figure out. The background was rebuilt by stretching edge pixels outwards until they overlap, like blurred glass: fragmentary, foggy and clear at once.
Tools & tech
- AI frame interpolation · 50 → 800 fps
- YOLACT++ segmentation
- Pixel-stretch background
Credits
- Music, concept
- Rachel Claudio
- Direction, post-production
- SIA SPACE — Mārtiņš Dāboliņš
- Awards
- Rome International Movie Awards — Winner · Berlin International Art Film Festival 2021 — Award Winner
- Official selection
- Venezia Shorts 2021 · Vienna International Film Awards 2021 · Venice Shorts 2021
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