Stagnate? Animate!
Getting things moving.
If you’ve been reading NIHILISTIC awhile you know one of my greatest frustrations is the lack of Nihilistics video. For whatever reason, no video of the band’s original iteration (1980 to 1985) has surfaced. Famously, we hired a videographer to shoot one of our gigs at My Father’s Place in Roslyn on Long Island but the only copy was destroyed when Mike Nicolosi’s basement flooded (back in the day, when the gig ended, any audio or video tapes were handed over to the band).
Because there are no moving images of us I’ve begun experimenting with AI text-to-image tools, which are getting scary good. I’m sharing some of my Adobe Firefly experiments here, listing them in the order I made them so you can see the progression.
This first one is a variation of something I used here awhile back. It’s the band gathered around the DEAD END sign on South 5th Street in Lindenhurst, down the block from where I grew up. The AI model blanked out the word DEAD on the sign. Duh.
The next experiment utilizes a Vicki Torch photo taken during our ill-fated Irving Plaza New Year’s Eve 1982 show. That’s the one where a bunch of other bands decided to stage a free counter-show to protest the “high” ticket prices (it was something like $15 to get in to ours, $5 for theirs). This example demonstrates how important it is to write an AI prompt that explicitly spells out what you want. I believe my prompt for this picture just said “Animate the figure.”
This next one worked out a bit better because I started switching up which image generation engine I used in Adobe Firefly. It’s the back cover of the Nihilstics EP brought to life.
Here is Paul Bearer, soon to form Sheer Terror, and a bunch of skinheads I hung out with in San Francisco on Haight Street one night in 1985. I brought an instant camera with me (a Kodak, not a Polaroid) and I shared the other images from that trip here.
Here’s another image you’ve seen here before – me on Christmas Day 1976 with my newly-gifted Ibanez 2350 Les Paul copy from my Nana – but now I move ( I deleted the first iteration of this it was so bad):
And the final one I’ve also shared here as a static image. It’s our cover band, Cobra, playing the Our Lady Of Perpetual Help Christmas Dance, 1976. Right there on Wellwood Avenue in Lindenhurst I first felt the power of commanding an audience with my incredibly inept soloing on “Stairway To Heaven.”
Alright, well… what did you think? Should I keep doing these? Or are they creepy AF?
