JCU Ideas Lab Blog Showcasing creativity supported by AI

Showcasing creativity supported by AI

QLD AI hub group photo

At the recent Cairns AI Hub End of Year Celebrations, Cairns creatives demonstrated how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be used to assist in developing new projects in the music, education and filmmaking sector that might not have been possible before.

Dr Samantha Horseman, HDR innovation & Industry, Lead and Cairns AI Hub Director also presented innovative awards to Cairns AI JCU researchers, educators and entrepreneurs from the JCU Founders-in-Residence portfolio: trees planted in their names for Queensland’s endangered koalas.

AI generated music

Mic Black, DJ and deep tech inventor from Cairns, is passionate about electronic music, and he says that he has no shortage of ideas for new compositions. “One of the biggest issues you have as a musician is that you have so many unfinished tracks. You have this great idea that hits you at one o'clock in the morning,” Mic says.

“It's this eight bar loop, and you're like, ‘yeah, I love that’. And then you think that you are going to finish it one day. But you don’t. I actually have a hard drive with 20 years’ worth of half-finished tracks.”

When Mic discovered the music composing tool Suno.ai, everything changed for him. “Suno allows me to upload my unfinished track, and I can tell it to finish it,” he says. “The way it works is just fantastic. Imagine, I have a bluegrass banjo track, and then I say to Suno, ‘what if it was tech house’? Or what if it had an EDM (Electronic Dance Music) build-up to create tension, and so on.”

Mic says he is aware that not everyone is happy about using AI in music. “A lot of people see AI in the creative industries as a way of replacing what people do, but for veteran producers like me, it's fantastic,” he says. “I get to explore possibilities at a speed I wouldn't be able to do otherwise. And in the end of the day, what matters to me is how it makes me feel and how it makes others feel.”

DJ Mic Black
DJ Mic Black

An AI-assisted educational spider experience

Music is also important when it comes to film-making, because a good soundtrack can nudge people to feel in a certain way. For their interactive movie about funnel-web spiders, James Cook University’s (JCU) Dr Linda Hernández Duran and filmmaker and cinematographer Raffaele Giordano, for instance, have also created an AI soundtrack.

“We’ve used Linda’s research on funnel-web spiders and trained ChatGPT. ChatGPT created the lyrics, and we also used Suno AI to generate the music for us, including synthetic voices singing about spiders.”

The spider movie, which is still a work in progress, is planned as an interactive experience that combines stop-motion photography with AI generated environments.

The scientist-filmmaker team is planning to use the CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) at JCU’s Ideas Lab for an immersive spider experience. “When we project the movie, we are going to customize the place in the way that people can interact with the environment of the spider,” Linda says.

Linda and Raffaele
Dr Linda Hernández Duran and Raffaele Giordano

Raffaele adds that even though AI is a helpful tool, it does not remove the artist from the equation. “AI needs a lot of input from the user. You will need an understanding of filmmaking and you still need an art director to drive the artistic side of things.”

An AI-generated movie to showcase Cairns and its ancient past

Jamie van Leeuwen, Founder of Absolutely AI, has also used AI to create a movie. However, his seven-minute film (see preview on YouTube) is entirely generated in AI and is meant as an alternative to regular tourism commercials.

“What we wanted to do was showcase the best of Cairns and Far North Queensland with this latest AI video technology. And we've done that in a short film,” Jamie says. “Turning the innumerable scenes into a complete video was quite a painstaking process, but it is a good example of what this technology can do.”

Jamie says that the process was time consuming. “There was much trial and error. This video runs for about seven to eight minutes, which doesn't seem like a huge length, but it did take perhaps a hundred times as much time to create it,” he says. “The cutting room floor is full of shots that didn't make it because they don't really fit into the overall aesthetic.

“We used Midjourney AI for a lot of our still imagery, and then we upscaled the image to achieve a higher resolution with a different tool. Finally, we used Luma AI to bring it all to life as a video, which we upscaled again,” Jamie says.

“This requires a lot of iterations, and weird things happen – hallucinations, that is, things that do not exist in the real world,” Jamie says. “It's very much a trial-and-error process. But the end result, if you can get it right, is a story told in ways that we haven't been able to before.”

Jamie did not create the soundtrack himself but decided to collaborate with AI-music expert Mic Black instead.

Sam and Jamie
Dr Samantha Horseman and Jamie van Leeuwen

“AI movie creation is still in its infancy, but this technology is just getting better and so much quicker,” he says. However, Jamie admits that there are issues that need to be resolved, such as stopping intentional misinformation, but also the possibility that AIs may unintentionally be trained with AI-generated content, which could lead to more hallucinations.

Planting trees for innovation

Rounding off the Cairns AI Hub End of Year Celebrations, Dr Samantha Horseman presented awards to leading Cairns AI educators and entrepreneurs. Instead of trophies, the winners received trees at the Australian Koala Foundation’s Quinlans property.

“More than 30 trees were planted in the names of our winners, so the koalas will continue to have a home and continue to have a very special place in Australia,” Samantha says.

The Cairns AI Hub in 2025

The HDR Innovation & Industry Programs and Cairns AI Hub will be back in early February with connectivity café on Wednesday, 5 February 2025.

Interested in joining the Cairns AI Hub?