Co-created by Sam De Arms
When we watch cartoons as kids, we often experience them as playful, funny, and very entertaining. The beloved 90’s cartoon ‘Hey Arnold!’, for example, tells a story of a nine year old kid who has a football shaped head and goes on fun adventures to help his friends with personal problems.
But if we rewatch our childhood cartoons as adults we realize that they often explore very serious and often troubling themes. Take the same Arnold. He constantly gets bullied by a girl at school and he is raised by his grandparents not knowing what happened to his parents.
During the creation of this project my co-creator Sam De Armes and I discussed the different cartoons we watched as children: Soviet Vinni Puh, Courage the Cowardly Dog, CatDog, Ну, погоди! and others.
We also realized that the news that we recently watched often has a similar but reserve effect: you watch them intending to hear information on serious topics, but sometimes they feel absurd or even comical. We decided to juxtapose these two ideas through the use of synthetic media.
“Your evening news” is a video collage, that uses a combination of cartoons, the news and AI generated images.
Process
We started by getting a sample of cartoons we watched as children, collectively gathering 1.5 hours of footage.
Then we used a custom scripts to generate ~5000 image frames from the videos to create a training set .
We used RunwayML to train a StyleGAN on the dataset. We did not know what this was going to produce but we were happy with the overall results. In the video below you can see the resemblance between the esoteric shapes and the original cartoons. In particular, we found Vinni Puh was prominently featured in a lot of the generated images.
Finally we worked in Premier Pro to create the video using original and green-screened video footage, and AI generated cartoons.
