For as long as I can remember, whenever I’ve been drawing, I’ve usually been drawing spaceships. Heavily influenced by things like Star Wars, Anime, and various Shmups*, they were once the main focus of my limited creative output. These days, since having any artistic enthusiasm beaten out of me, they’re more likely to be just quick doodles in the corners of sketchbooks, usually done while I’m waiting for the meeting to end.

Occasionally, the odd sketch would make it to vectors, but I’ve never had the skills or patience to develop the drawings into anything more. Until recently...

Initially, and just out of interest, I wanted to explore if and how AI could learn from the drawings, so that more could be produced in a similar style. The results were mixed — some right, some wrong, some very odd  — and it took a lot of back-and-forth to keep things on track. All in all, they felt a bit generic and lacked any real character.

Besides all that, I could handle the drawing part myself. What I couldn't do was transform the drawings into something that felt real and tactile...

Like toys!

At around the same time, electronic music producer dgoHn asked me if I’d like to do a promo for one of his upcoming releases. He’d seen another (short) promo that I’d created for Actual Owl, and wanted something with a similar “spacey” feel.

The song in question (Hera Endleofan) had a melodic ambience to it — different from dgoHn’s usual signature drummy brain dance — and I suggested that it might sound like the background music at an imaginary futuristic spaceship museum or expo. And even though the initial look on his face suggested otherwise, he eventually agreed that it might be a good idea, if I could get the spaceships to look realistic and believable.

So I got to work, utilising a few different tools to make the spaceships look really real.

Low-motion video clips were generated from the best images, which I then cut and edited together with the soundtrack — an edited version of the original song, comprising 32 bars. To maintain a nice rhythm, I aligned one of 16 different spaceships with every two bars.

For a finishing touch, I added a transliterated 16-part poetic retelling of Hera’s role in the Iliad, and also designed a set of icons to accompany each stanza.