Idles

British rock band IDLES have unveiled a surprise collaboration, bringing together the video from Coldplay's classic song 'Yellow' with IDLES' new single 'Grace'.

Commissioner John Moule approached production studio Joyrider with the project - posing the challenge of taking the renowned music promo (released in 2000) and making it look like Chris Martin was singing IDLES' new track.

In turn, Joyrider approached Stone Dogs to work alongside director Jonathan Irwin, harnessing our flame compositing and finishing expertise to help realise this amazing challenge.

In a cyclic turn of events Brian Carbin, senior VFX artist and co-founder of Stone Dogs had worked on the original 'Yellow' video.

Stonedogs VFX team of Brian Carbin, Dave Kiddie, Rufus Blackwell and Danny Coster were so deeply immersed in the process that they learned the differences between the nasolabial crease, philtrum, cupid's bow, upper lip, lateral commissure, vermillion border and the lower lip - even finding themselves on occasion singing the lyrics whilst looking at a mirror in order to mimic the phenoms needed for convincing animated lip sync.

Jonathan Irwin, director and AI technical lead, Joyrider, led weeks of research and development and refining machine-learning approaches saying: "To create the training set, we fed every frame of the original video into DeepFaceLab and ran for five million iterations, approximately one and a half months of processing time, running 24/7. At each stage of improvement, there would be backwards and forwards of new AI training runs and flame VFX work, tracking, extensions, clean up, more tracking, test composites, more AI, more clean up etc."

Wanting to make the video look more like Chris did over 20 years ago, the team were able to take the production to the next level and film the "real" Chris Martin in the band's studio, singing the song at double speed (50fps) with three 4K cameras. The video was then played back and slowed down, adding an additional layer of subtlety to match the original plate.

The filmed material was then Deepfaked further, helping to deliver a convincing AI performance of Chris Martin.

Special thanks to directors James Frost & Alex Smith and the rest of the crew behind the original Yellow video, Coldplay and their management team. Contains a sample from the music video for "Yellow" as performed by Coldplay, licensed courtesy of Parlophone Records Limited.