THE GOAL
UNVEILED REBELLION is a bridal catwalk runway to highlight the collaboration between Brides by Olivia (a high-end bridal store providing premium bridal dresses from famous brands around the world) and Vivienne Westwood (one of the most notable names in the fashion industry based in the United Kingdom).
The main theme for the runway was “dark techno gothic style” to make it feel like a “ritual” rather than any runway show. The ritual would guided the audience through a journey: Ritual → Desire → Dream → Break.
THE CHALLENGE
From the initial brief and the desire from the client, my role was to create visuals fit for the 2 main artists of the show: TANKTA (as an opening DJ) and TLINH (the main act of the bridal catwalk). For the opening show with TANKTA (DJ), the clients wanted 3 visuals based around an Ancient Greek theme: Caryatids Statue, Parthenon Temple, and The Colosseum. The music vibe was going to be around Tech House to Dark techno (126-135bpm), and the main elements would be how I play around with the lighting.
Controlling the lighting to match the BPM of the music was trickier since for AI video generation, you don’t have full control over the result for beatmatching. To catch up with the tight deadline, instead of building the structure from scratch or spending an expensive amount to buy models, I used image references from the structure to generate 3D models with decent quality, and then animated the light sequence inside Blender, which saved a lot of time.
For the TLINH runway, the clients gave me a brief direction, which was that the 20-min show would be divided into 3 main acts: “FEVER” (Seductive/Hypnotic/Rising desire) - “I’M THINKING ABOUT YOU” (Eerie/Surreal) - “UNTIL NOW” (Chaotic/Rebellion/Release).
At first, the clients intended to utilize Vivienne Westwood’s existing material and apply VFX on top of the material to optimize the schedule. But to convey the storytelling, I proposed a direction of using generative AI by building a coherent environment that highlighted Vivienne Westwood’s emblem but also followed the theme of the runway. All the visuals would have mostly red as the main color palette (to respect the white from the brides).
The scene I created took place at the main hall inside a cathedral, with the highlight being the giant Rose window with an intricate Vivienne Westwood’s emblem pattern and a giant pendulum at the center in the shape of Vivienne Westwood’s emblem as well. Based on the description for each act from the brief, I built a mini storyboard to help the clients understand the meaning behind each frame (for example: dark tar represents “seduction”; falling rose petals represent “eerie romantic”, or the destruction of the cathedral represents “rebellion”, etc.). All the scenes were generated by Nano Banana (Google) and the videos were generated flexibly between Veo (Google) and KlingAI.
*All writing is my own - no AI used.