Ruairi Robinson’s anime apocolypse

Bubblegum-pink pop stars, Rudyard Kipling’s poetry and an apocalyptic invasion of LA aren’t necessarily things you’d expect to work well together in a music video, but with the help of AI, anything is possible for director Ruairi Robinson.  

The filmmaker, who first caught our eye with his unsettling project for Steve Moore, continues to push the boundaries of AI in narrative-led music videos with this fictional promo for a made-up singer, inspired by English author Rudyard Kipling’s poem Boots.  

The project, which was produced by Joyrider, envisions a modern invasion of Los Angeles by cartoon anime monsters, where soldiers are sent to their deaths while a pink-haired girl dances on their corpses, clad in increasingly girly fascist costumes. 

Robinson added this on his creative process: “The video was produced in a two-week, 16-hour-a-day fever dream. The first week involved generating images of the singer using Veo 2, which I then used to generate footage of her singing using image-to-video software. 

During the second week, I used this generated footage to train a lip-sync model, and do fixes in post using After Effects and Da Vinci Resolve. Veo 2 has trouble creating consistent characters, since it’s a text-to-video program, so I had to swap her face in some shots to help maintain character consistency.”