When Photography Begins to Move

I’ve been experimenting with the image to video generative Ai platform Runway ML which seems to be one of the best when it comes to maintaining the veracity of the original image in the generated video piece.  Here’s a short experimental film that I made from my own personal work.  Transforming strong original source still imagery into motion picture is an interesting space with endless possibilities.  I also think that it maintains a strong artistic connection to original work rather than fully text promoted imagery and video. The motion becomes an interpretation rather than a fabrication and like anything in the creative space, the stronger the input the better the final piece.  Integrating Gen Ai into creative workflows really is in its infancy and feels very like the early days of the Internet where we all knew this is powerful and transformative but didn’t really know how it was going to play out. Just like early web creators weren’t “web designers” yet, perhaps today’s photographers experimenting with AI aren’t “AI artists” but are in some way beginning to shape the grammar of hybrid image-motion.

I’ve been experimenting with the image-to-video generative AI platform Runway ML, which, in my experience, is one of the strongest tools for maintaining the veracity of the original image within a generated video. This short experimental film was created from my own still imagery. Transforming strong source photographs into moving images is an exciting new space and one with seemingly endless possibilities.

What I find compelling is how this approach maintains a clear artistic connection to the original work, rather than relying solely on text-prompted imagery or video. The resulting motion becomes an interpretation rather than a fabrication, and, as with anything in the creative process, the stronger the input, the stronger the final piece.

Integrating generative AI into creative workflows is still in its infancy. It feels very much like the early days of the Internet when we knew the technology was powerful and transformative but hadn’t yet seen how it would reshape everything. Just as early web creators weren’t yet “web designers,” today’s photographers experimenting with AI may not think of themselves as “AI artists,” but we may already be shaping the emerging grammar of hybrid image to motion.