Life, the universe and everything… in 120 seconds

A humanoid creature bursts into life and evolves as a narrator poetically outlines the story of life – the big bang, "volcanoes, fire and oceans of lava... then a single cell, then sponges, then moss... then lizards, then big fucking lizards… “. 

The character dances and morphs through the iterations and reflections of evolving life on earth – “Then monkeys… then monkeys with shoes,” – which is a pretty accurate description of mankind. 

Fusetti, who wrote and directed the film, with Wild Island producing, reveals his aim was to capture, “the overwhelming feeling of human life”. 

As well as an epic ode to existence – and an ominous projection of its possible end – Generation is also a beautifully crafted mix of animation, dance and AI.

Fusetti rotoscoped the performance of the dancer/choreographer, Evie Webzell, filling her silhouette with a mix of animation and stock footage. He then fed the results to a text-to-image open source machine-learning algorithm (Disco Diffusion) before compositing the results back onto the original footage. 

He praises the AI workflow for allowing him to “render every individual frame of the film as a unique and extremely detailed illustration.”