All of the feelings! I've been brewing on this idea of doing liquid simulations on various emoji. Emoji splatting against the wall, swirling down the drain, and smashing into each other. But after some experiments in Blender I just wasn't getting the look that I was hunting for. I wanted to focus on liquid along with glitches.

So I tabled the idea for a few months until I started experimenting with the dd_GlitchAssist frontend. After some initial tests I realized there was so much potential for creating animations that were created specifically for the datamosh processing. So I collected loads of emoji characters, sequenced them, and did some experiments in After Effects to find which animation styles worked best.

At a later point I wondered what would happen if I trained StyleGAN2 on just the emoji faces, but the training quickly reached mode collapse due the dataset being too small (123 images). Luckily I checked out some of the early PKL’s of the FFHQ retraining process and was able to choose a model which showcases a scary mix of human faces and emoji. From there I had the idea of quickly editing back and forth between the uncanny AI faces video and emoji stop motion video, which worked better than I expected. And then I fed them into dd_GlitchAssist to add some cross pollination.

Originally I was going to key out the green background and render out these videos with alpha, but it was removing too much interesting content and so I left it up to the VJ performer to add a real-time chromakey effect to their personal taste. Enjoy the sexting easter egg.

Released July 2022