Marionette? Cigarette!
NIHILISTIC might be entering a smoking new stage.
Two weeks ago I wrote about seeing Alex Dawson’s new “Memoiristic Monodrama” Room To Swing An Axe and since then I’ve been having these weird dreams of NIHILISTIC – my “Memoir with Guitar” – as a stage production.
Stranger still, I keep picturing the band as marionettes. So I did what any modern person would do and used AI to visualize that, starting with Mike.
First, I found a few decent reference photos:
Then I used Gemini to make Mike into a marionette. It took four prompt revisions before I arrived at this:
It didn’t quite nail Mike’s Hagstrom then used Adobe Firefly to do an image-to-video conversion. That result was dumped into PhotoShop and I added the opening snippet of After Death to give it some flavor:
I’m mostly pleased with the result, except for the phantom cigarette smoke.
But what do you think? Is this creepy? Cool? Cool and creepy? And do I dare show you how I ended up looking as a marionette (I’m still working on it, BTW)?