DarkDesire II VJ Loops

I expanded last month’s theme, and you can read about its creation process here.

This time, I created more elements to interact with the veiled woman: a tarantula, a spotted orchid, and a faceted gemstone orb. I also created her skeleton, but more about that later.

The Orchid start frame was actually created last month in Nano Banana Pro. I generated an animation of it closing and reopening in Kling 4.0, at 4K resolution, because it had just been released and I was curious to test it. It worked well.

I wanted another take on the completely covered woman, so I generated a start frame of her right in the middle of a rotation. I then used Kling 4.0 to animate her rotating 360 degrees.

Next, I generated the Tarantula frames, keeping the same gem-adorned design language and making it as hairy as possible. Once I had the spider in the pose I wanted, I used that image as a reference to generate another frame of it sitting in the woman’s hands.

I then animated the Tarantula on her hands, making the spider rise up into an attack pose. I later connected two generations to create a single loop. For the top-down shot of the spider, I wanted it to move its legs sporadically before raising up. I planned to take that rising movement and bounce it on the beat in Resolume.

Next, I wanted the veiled woman to perform a dark ceremony with her hands. Kling 4.0 generated the animation well, but it couldn’t loop it as easily as Seedance does. So I extracted the last frame of an animation I liked and used it as the starting frame for the next generation, rather than trying to make the original start frame match the ending. I generated a couple more animations and edited them together to create a 32-second loop.

I also wanted a different red light source coming from behind the woman. I generated a frame of a red moon in Nano Banana Pro and placed it in the background. It looked okay, but I couldn’t come up with an interesting enough animation for it, so I scrapped the idea.

I then created a faceted gemstone orb and tried generating a full 360-degree rotation in Kling 4.0. That didn’t turn out too well: the orb only rotated a little and the animation didn’t loop properly. Then I realized it didn’t actually have to rotate the full 360 degrees, as long as it looked like it did. So I generated a couple more rotation sequences and edited them together in Premiere Pro to make them look like a continuous loop.

Now I wanted to try something new: taking the woman’s dark ceremony loop and changing the character into a skeleton. I took a frame from that loop and edited it in Nano Banana Pro, turning the woman into a skeleton while keeping her overall look. I then used Higgsfield’s Genjutsu Motion Transfer, asking it to replace the woman in the video with the character from my reference image. It worked like magic.

The Kling 4.0 animations were generated in 1080p at 24fps. Just as I did with the original DarkDesire VJ loops, I upscaled them to 4K using Topaz Astra Web and slowed them down 2x in the Topaz Video desktop app. I then time-remapped them in After Effects to fit 120 BPM at 30fps. Finally, I removed the chroma key backgrounds from the characters and elements in After Effects using Keylight 1.2.