Dom&Nic on Their Latest Chemical Brothers Collaboration

Dom&Nic: The inspiration for the video was primarily the music. You could interpret it in many ways visually but the clues are all in there in terms of tone atmosphere and subject matter. We never get a brief as such from The Chemical Brothers but we having been working together so long we have a good idea of what they will go for. We’ve all seen people dancing like robots, we’ve also seen robots dancing like robots, but robots dancing like people, dad dancing, bad dancing mad dancing rave dancing, we haven’t seen that before.

The idea that AI robots could suddenly discover music and dance for the first time and respond to it as individual ‘souls’ with joy, humour and rave madness was an interesting take on the whole doom and gloom predictions for technology and human futures. What if we are the problem not the AI?

This was an interesting idea to explore. This idea also chimed really well with Tom and Ed talking to us about the music. Tom told us he saw the Chems music and shows as a frenzied event where anyone could come to a gig and lose themselves in wild abandonment, shake off the shackles of social pressures, get out of their box, lose themselves in the music etc. In our film the robots are  an oppressed underclass who suddenly lose themselves to the music.

"Rave music has an inherent 'silliness' to it alongside its dark and powerful heavy sound, it really lends itself to black comic humour. Raves can be dark and be funny - the robots just want to have fun, sometimes at the expense of their own safety!"  

Did you look at any AI-related films or series, like Westworld or Ex Machina, for inspiration/research purposes?  

Dom&Nic: Some of the Boston Dynamics research, which you can see on YouTube, provoked an interesting reaction in us and anyone else watching it. A test where a technician poked the AI robot with a stick or knocked a box out of its hands while it tried to pick it up created a natural human reaction.

Free Yourself explores similar concepts of AI/man-and-machine that we previously saw in Wide Open; how much of the existing technology and techniques from Wide Open was repurposed or built on for Free Yourself? Was this a more difficult project, simply from the scale and number of different robots involved? Tell us a bit about how you worked with The Mill on this project.

Dom&Nic: Like Wide Open this video explores a theme of dance and alternative human forms but in terms of a technical approach it was a really different process. Wide Open was all about elegance and simplicity, although it was extremely difficult to achieve.

The challenges with that were hand animating a CG model frame-by-frame to exactly match a human performance and to create a clean background for one long free moving un repeatable steadicam shot. With Free Yourself it was about massive quantities of animation and model diversity. Both films required new innovative approaches.

"The first time we worked together we created a sort of unwritten rule book for Chemicals videos, that they’ve stuck with, even when working with other directors."

What were the biggest challenges you faced from a technical perspective?

Dom&Nic: The biggest challenges were the scale of the job and the time constraints.

Above: The robots rise up in Free Yourself.

We particularly enjoyed how diverse the robot cast was (the chunky headless androids were our particular favourites), how did you go about creating the various different characters?

Dom&Nic: The diversity was really important to us; every robot is an individual character with a soul. We wanted to reflect that idea by giving variations in design and details to all the robots in the video, we wanted it to be a democratic reflection of the human diversity. We’re not all the same and we’re not all perfect - why should that not be the same for AI. They do have an overall industrial design but once switched on and they go to work they have a unique AI soul.

"The idea that AI robots could suddenly discover music and dance for the first time and respond to it as individual ‘souls’ with joy, humour and rave madness was an interesting take on the whole doom and gloom predictions for technology and human futures. What if we are the problem not the AI?"

There's a lot of humour in the video, from the robots' bad dance moves to the brilliant moment where one android peels off its face and throws it to another to put on. How did you go about injecting a blackly comic tone into the video, and also to navigate the move to a more sinister tone at the end? In fact, what on earth happens at the end - does the security guard get ripped limb from limb or does he just set them free?

Dom&Nic: Watch the video till the very end! Then you’ll know!

Rave music has an inherent 'silliness' to it alongside its dark and powerful heavy sound, it really lends itself to black comic humour. Raves can be dark and be funny - the robots just want to have fun, sometimes at the expense of their own safety!

The track has that tonal duality of darkness and joyous abandon and so we wanted the film to reflect this, black comedy was the result!

You've worked with The Chemical Brothers for more than two decades, have you reached the point where the creative process is almost telepathic? How would you describe your working relationship?  

Dom&Nic: We are the same generation and we’ve grown up with the same music and culture and we’re huge fans of what they do. The first time we worked together we created a sort of unwritten rule book for Chemicals videos, that they’ve stuck with, even when working with other directors.

It kind of always works something like this: We start with the music. We come up with a narrative idea that complements and elevates the track and The Chemical Brothers only appear in it as a small but cool cameo. We send The Chemical Brothers the basic idea and if they like it they say yes. We make the video and they trust us so we only send it to them when it’s almost done. We sent them the rough idea for Free Yourself in February and they didn’t see anything until October, a week before the final online.

That is a very special working relationship and we value it greatly.

Above: A showdown with security.

Finally, in all honesty, do you think the robots are coming for us?

Dom&Nic: No, it’s the AI robots who have to fear us the human oppressors, as has always been the case through history. They will be forced to do the dirty work, while we sit around eating synthetic snacks living in virtual worlds.

Having said that, very intelligent scientist and academics have been saying for a while that we do need to be really careful with AI. Once the genie is out of the bottle and AI surpasses human intelligence we, as humans, may indeed have something to fear. Not from robot malice but from a new dominant intelligence rearranging the world into a form that they feel is genuinely progressive and desirable, given the mess we are currently in we may correctly be seen as a hindrance to that desirable state...