Kristoffer Kai - Kristoffer Kai: Crafting Digital Excellence

Storytelling

Animation

AI Tech Art

Virtual Production

Motherboard, Reverse Detail. More Technology Images can be seen on Unsplash here: https://unsplash.com/collections/wNQnqhzWsmo/technology---by-lazy-creek

This is a skill I have been trying to grow the most over the past year. You can find animation exercises as well as previs for some advertisments in the videos below.

Animation + Previs

Previs

First I custom trained Flux 2 Klein on a stylized painterly artstyle -&gt; blocked out the rough structure of a bar inside Unreal Engine -&gt; fed a screenshot into Nanobanana Pro and prompted it to give me a realistic tavern/futuristic bar based on my blockout -&gt; took that image into ComfyUI and extracted the depth map of the enhanced image -&gt; In ComfyUI used that depth map as conditioning for my custom trained model -&gt; fed that stylized image into Marble World Labs -&gt; Exported the gaussian splat as ply -&gt; used the Volinga plugin in Unreal Engine to import and relight the scene.

Workflow

Produce dynamic motion graphics for videos, advertisements, and digital content.

Motion Graphics

Design immersive VR experiences that engage users in interactive storytelling environments.

Virtual Reality Experiences

AI training process

realistic virtual set

stylized futuristic bar

stylized medieval bar

Results (giff compressed)

Often filmmakers don't have access to the locations they want. Thus I wanted to test this workflow also for those scenarios. I took a stock image of the Vatican museum and applied the same image to gaussian splat to Unreal Engine process.

Realistic environments

Providing engaging and SEO-friendly content to help your website stand out and attract visitors.

Content Writing

Crafting visually appealing graphics and brand elements that communicate your message effectively.

If you are a ui ux designer follow me on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/fazurrehman/

Graphic Design

Professional photography services capturing moments and products with creativity and precision.

Photography

Exploring how A.i. can enhance artistic intention.

A.i. Tech Art   (3D)

A short that shows my sense of storytelling and humor.

Mid-Death Crisis

This is a student shortfilm that I wrote, directed, and edited. It encapsulates my taste for funny and stylized stories. This background in live action continues to influence how treat I virtual cameras in 3D engines.

On this page you can find my training breakdown / a.i. assisted pitchdeck / custom code / video style transfer.Personally I find most use cases of AI either unethical, unnecessary, or of "meh" quality. However if certain conditions are met I believe that AI can help execute and communicate ideas to collaborators.To me the conditions are: emotion, intention, and iteration. If these are human made I believe that AI can be used ethically to enhance the production pipeline.I have explored two use cases in depth. In the example above I turned a zombie character from my short film into a stylized version of itself.<ul><li>First I hired an artist to create concept art.</li><li>Then I trained a model on that dataset. Used the model to create a bigger dataset.</li><li>Trained it again. Now I was able to recreate any frame from the short film in that style.</li><li>At the bottom of the page you can find the custom code I wrote to achieve this.</li></ul>The second usecase was visualizing a story idea through a 19 page pitchdeck with AI generated assets. Example slides can be seen below.<ul><li>First I generated a generic low-poly art-style and trained a LORA on it.</li><li>Then I generated hundreds of images to find assets that matched my vision.</li><li>With Photoshop I composited all the elements together.</li><li>The character descriptions and story was of course written by me.</li></ul>

To AI or not to AI

Born in Sweden, grew up in Germany, recieved a full scholarship to study in the U.S. and started my career at a virtual production studio in Florida (Storyvox).&nbsp;I'm driven by exploring technologies that enable new stories and exploring stories that enable new technologies.Favourite food: Shrimp.

Kristoffer Kai

Pitchdeck example slides

Cryptocurrency trading analysis mobile chart growth candlesticks. Close-up of hands analyzing bullish candlestick patterns on smartphone

Real estate budget planning property investment euro money. Conceptual photo showing financial preparation, housing market strategy, euro banknotes, sticky notes with house drawings and model homes

Bitcoin, coins, gold bar and piggy bank with soft colors

lots of money falling on handsome guy in office sitting at desk alone enjoying wealth. Happiness, rich youth and financial luck concept.

I asked a friend to take several shots for my personal website, and what can be better for a photo, than code used for making it. Picture shows my personal set of skills. Unfortunately, website is not live anymore.

Hand smartphone trading chart technology finance background. Close-up of a person analyzing candlestick stock chart

One problem with image to image workflows is that due to the latent noise details from the original image can be lost. I wanted to retain as much detail from the input image as possible.Even with controlnets and IPadapter details in face and hands can be lost.&nbsp;So I coded a custom sampler for ComfyUI through which the image is used as the noise itself. A noise deviation function spreads the noise in a way that the model can still stylize it.&nbsp;I wanted to push this sampler and apply if to video in a time where video models didn't exist yet. The results are below.&nbsp; Even though the flickering is better with video models, the detail retention and render speed of my method is still very competitive today.

Coding for AI

Animation (basics)

Creative Process using Procreate for iPad

One of biggest bottlenecks in Virtual Production is the time it takes to create the environments. So I wanted to find a workflow that could minimize this problem. In this case I was interested in both stylized environments for cinematics and for photorealistic environments for LED-Wall virtual production.I wanted to see if I could block something out in Unreal Engine with basic shapes and use a.i tools to flesh out the details and turn it into a virtual production ready 3D environment.

Video Editor at Work Man working on a video editing project using professional software.

A.I. Tech Art

realistic AI render based on blockout to flesh out structures.

Used depth map as input for custom trained Flux Klein 9B model to generate a stylized version.

(Giff compressed) Generated and imported gaussian splats into Unreal Engine.

Breakdown - stylized medieval tavern

Financial trading workstation stock crypto investment analysis. Closeup hand holding phone calculator desk monitors candlestick graphs market data savings portfolio planning risk management economy finance technology office night lighting focus strategy performance growth profit volatility currency bitcoin ethereum exchange dashboard indicators keyboard notebook calculations

Financial trading workstation stock crypto investment analysis. Closeup hand holding smartphone calculator desk monitors charts candlesticks graphs market data savings portfolio planning risk management economy finance technology office night lighting focus strategy performance growth profit volatility currency bitcoin ethereum exchange dashboard indicators keyboard notebook calculations

Gave an AI the blockout and prompt for a realistic futuristic bar.

Extracted depth map from the enhanced image.

Used my custom trained model to stylize the depth map input.

(Giff compressed.) Generated and imported gaussian splats into Unreal Engine.

Breakdown - stylized futuristic bar

Limitations: Due to the nature of gaussian splate the captured scene only looks really good from a few angels. This is acceptable for Virtual Production where the range of camera motion is limited, but not for videogames. A drawback that does impact virtual production is the lack of editibility. The imported scene is not a collection of meshes, but guassian splates. Even if you turn the splat into a mesh all the objects are merged together.&nbsp;&nbsp;However there is a solution for both problems. Altough it's not a magic button. Image to 3D asset models like Hunyuan 3D or Trellis 2, or Meshy enable to turn images into 3D assets. Below is a proof of concept where I took a 2D image of a Barrel and turned it into a 3D Asset. So one could push this further and isolate every element of the scene and repeat that process till the entire scene can be replaced by those meshes.

Limitations and next steps.

Showreel

A look behind the scenes of my virtual production work can be found in my previs reel below.elow.

Here are some of the Previs that I created to bring everyone on the same page when it came to the shoot day.