Artist's Statement:

Welcome to the world of PLSTC. My intention with this project was to tackle plastic pollution by creating an intense confrontational piece of work that depicts an undersea dystopia and elicits an awkward visceral, cerebral, and emotional response from the viewer. Somewhere between a fascination with the classic beauty of underwater imagery at the same time as sheer horror of plastic pollution. 

No animals were harmed during the making of this film since PLSTC is 99% a mixed-media digital fiction. It is the result of an experimental process involving a symbiosis between human sensitivity and digital tools, some of which use generative artificial intelligence. PLSTC is composed of almost 400 SFX shots. All the while, an intense piece of classical music is used to carry the visuals along while building to a crescendo that underlines the urgency of this problem. 

First, I created (with the help of Midjourney, a text2image AI software that uses prompts to generate unique still images) a collection of several thousand images representing approximately 40 animal and plant species in order to select the most compelling ones for the film. Once manually retouched and recomposed using Photoshop, I transformed these 400 final stills into individual 3D scenes with a depth maps generator tool which also relies on AI. Then, I again manually touched up the individual shots to ensure their visual credibility once in movement. After enlarging each shot to 4K, with the help of another specialized AI software designed for this purpose, I was able to begin editing and compositing the film with traditional postproduction software such Premiere and After Effects. 99% of the film is digital and the remaining 1% is the footage of real particles. 

From the original concept to the sound design surround mix, the production took me two months and went rather smoothly and much quicker compared to say, a classic CGI production. 

Finally, I pledged to give 20% of any profits earned by PLSTC to NGOs on the field.