The project explores the birth of electricity within the UK and how it has evolved since the first electrical current in Blackburn originated from the Fusebox site. Our contributions included working with the Mitchell and Kenyon cinema archive and the first-ever Western film, 'The Kidnappers". Using this material, we utilised AI technologies to re-interpret the movie with a modern twist in response to prompts developed with young people at the Youth Zone.
Challenge
Jamie and Alex from Uncultured Creatives were tasked with developing various creative projects and conducting research around the site of the first substation in the UK, Blackburn. The project explored a range of traditional mediums. They wanted to innovate with the project and, as a result, brought the Sairo team in to help.
Solution
After showing the Uncultured Creative team some of our work around text-to-video AI, they wanted to see what we could do with this project.
Using Runway Gen1 (Video-to-video AI), we used pop cultural references to morph the film into an eye-catching but jarring new version of The Kidnappers by Mitchell and Kenyon.
Technical Challenges
The primary issue we encountered in this project and had to tackle was the image data we needed to input into the project. Due to the age of 'The Kidnappers', the quality could be better for the AI to pick up and manipulate. We did our best to improve it and tackle this issue, but ultimately, we could only get it so far.
Result
We produced a one-minute recreation of The Kidnappers film, launched at the Fuse Box launch event on an Igloo cube system. The film opened up a lot of questions about AI within video and the negatives of being able to change the narrative of content so quickly; it was a successful project with the outcomes we wanted.
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