Blumquist

Question

Tell us a little bit about yourself, where are you from? What's your background?

Blumquist

I was born in Athens, Greece, in 1985 and moved to Germany in 1991 with my parents. Even if I have studied Anglistics and Germanistics in order to become a teacher, my passion has always been to create strange things by pushing the boundaries of each medium I work with. I am a musician, a filmmaker and AI artist and very interested in culture, art and people.

Q: Your style is extremely polished. How did you learn the craft of filmmaking?

B: I primarily learned it by watching tons of movies and series. I’m a big fan of Vince Gilligan and the Coen Brothers and I have learned so much just by watching their work very carefully. I started making short films at the age of 14 and later made music videos semi-professionally. Being a filmmaker has always been a dream that felt far fetched and unrealistic but against all expectations AI made it possible to fulfill that dream.

Q: Can you drive us through your process? Do you follow a chronological approach or something more of a trial error?

B: Before generating even a single image, I just worked on the story of The Transmorpher for three weeks. I created simple story boards for each episode and set rules from the very beginning. The rules were: 1. Show, don’t tell and keep things short and simple 2. There must be a story AND a theme 3. Two minutes duration for each episode 4. Each episode must include some sort of cliffhanger 5. Each episode introduces something new about the protagonist or the story.

Since I had structured the story and spread it across ten episodes beforehand, I knew what the content of each episode was. Then I started by generating images with MidJourney to find the right reference images for my characters. After that I basically used very similar prompts and changed only locations, expressions and postures in order to create the scenes that were then animated with LUMA and Gen-2 & 3 by adding additional prompts for character and camera movement. Next, I used Eleven Labs to generate speech (the dialogues and monologues were written in word documents beforehand) and then I worked through them, mostly by using speech to speech (which means I recorded all the voices and let ElevenLabs change my voice). The next step was to lip sync the audio with the video clips, which I did with pika and Gen-2. Now here’s where my favorite part began: the editing. While editing in Davinci Resolve, I also generated music (Udio and Suno) and sound effects (Eleven Labs) as needed. The first cut was usually too slow or too long – that’s where I had to decide what can be left out or shortened just so that coherence is there but also a lot of room for interpretation for the viewer. The final step was post processing (color grading, dynamic zooms, camera shakes etc. but nothing too fancy).

Q: Transmorpher is the perfect blend of VFX and narrative, where each propels the other forward. How did you come up with it?

B: When Pau asked me to create a series using only AI tools, the video AIs were, to put it mildly, pretty awful. Gen-2, for example, would morph people into bizarre shapes and make them move in strange, unnatural ways. I thought, 'Why not turn these flaws into part of the story?' The concept quickly evolved into an anti-hero with a superpower: the ability to morph in ridiculous, imperfect ways—much like how AI was struggling to do its job. In a way, the AI became a co-author, with its mistakes and glitches playing a crucial role in shaping the narrative on screen. Ironically, when I started working on episode 4, the video AIs had improved so much that I had to use tricks to make them mess up again and bring back that crazy, morphing magic they used to do 95% of the time before the release of the new AI models.

Q: What's next after the Transmorpher?

B: I have a fun idea for a non-narrative series that I’d love to make and I also want to make stills for a new NFT-collection. I’m equally excited to keep the fire alive for Wyatt and can’t wait to create more content together with a fan base that expands The Transmorpher universe. And who knows – perhaps a spin-off featuring Brian from Episode 3 could be in the cards?