I pivoted work wise from a lot of management duties, auditing, infrastructure design and so forth to getting hands-on again when I came across Diffusers. Diffusers made the barrier to entry low enough to be achievable for me to get into CV (Transformers too). I really wanted a media/art/creative break but to stay in tech (ish) so…
- Built movie “patinas” using Stable Diffusion (SDXL). Created large sets of screenshots of various films I like for their cinematography and trained LORA on these images. Malick and Blank to name a few. There’s this fantastic documentary called Vernon, Florida directed by Errol Morris that had a gritty, warm (humid), swampy, lonely feel about the content and the cinematography. I made a LORA on a few thousand screenshots from it for fun.
- Built profiles or “filters” of film types I have shot over the years that are no longer made. E.G. Kodachrome, APX100 (original emulsion), and etc. These can be used to add that style to any photograph or video in a superior way (I think).
- Built a bleach bypass LORA with all of the BB movies I could find (there are only about 5-6 true BB movies out there). Saving Private Ryan being filmed entirely in BB. Other notables include 1984 and The Road. The first one I could find was a 1960’s Japanese film of which the name escapes me right now- maybe “Her Brother”… In short, if you don’t bleach out all of the silver you get a very moody look with color film as the dyes remain as well which causes at least a stop of underexposure. I cannot imagine being the person that had the responsibility of not messing up original inter-negative or positive 35mm film stock. Only the highest budget movies would make copies before doing something irreversible like that- Probably SPR.
- Kodachrome LORA’s that will take any image and make it look like a Kodachrome. Built from a dataset of over 5000 Kodachrome slides on Flickr. I ran a small LLM to find and remove blurry or too damaged Kodachromes but I didn’t filter out small light leaks or slightly scratched transparencies. Actually adds to the “old” look and the color still pops which was without a doubt the reason people loved it so much. RIP K14. Fun fact while I’m rambling- The Kodachrome process was incredibly labor intensive. There are at least 14 steps to develop a roll. Compare that with E6 or C41 (you can get away with 3 steps with these film types).
- Started a Children’s book that takes place in 1960’s Louisiana in the Bayou. That took a very, very long time to find source imagery to create a LORA for the backgrounds and the scenes (old dog trots and stuff like that). Turns out there are a lot of postcards of Louisiana that are online from that era- mostly of motels. I resorted to having AI create some synthetic imagery based on a pretrained model then layered a film LORA on that to create a broader dataset. It was hard (or laborious, really) and took a long, long time. I don’t think I’ve gotten a good grasp on creating synthetic imagery yet to supplement datasets.