Melanjazz is a story about homesickness, yearning for places that warm our hearts.

FROM THE DIRECTOR

"Melanjazz is a story about homesickness, yearning for places that warm our hearts.

The plot of the clip is an interpretation of the Avar poem of the early 20th century - "Mariam" by the Dagestan poet Mahmoud from Kakhabroso. By the will of fate, the hero, who finds himself far from home, longs for his native land and is searching for symbols that at least remotely remind him of home. After long wanderings, he finds himself where he did not expect at all. One of the key features of the work is the use of neural network image generation throughout the entire clip, thanks to which it was possible to enrich the narrative.

The constantly changing faces of the heroine in the final part of the video are based on portraits of women by various Dagestan artists. Thus, it was possible to show that the heroine is a collective image of a Caucasian woman, as a symbol of her background and native land. The poem goes beyond exclusively love lyrics and takes on new meanings, turning into a single audiovisual work.

The shooting of the video took place in Istanbul and its environs, which also influenced the work with neural networks. So, most generations are inspired by a series of Istanbul paintings by the great painter Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky.

All work with neural networks was done by Valeria Titova, one of the first neural network artists, who managed to maintain a stable, well-adjusted visual language throughout the video. Each frame is the result of diligent work with the selection of the right prompts, hundreds of hours of tests, discussions, solving artistic and logical tasks.

The main work on the clip took place in warpfusion, a Stable Diffusion-based video processing tool created by programmer Alex Spirin."

- Timur Abakarov