When I got a call from Oleksii Makhurenko and Oleksii Potapenko — the artist himself, now performing under the new project Slavic Balagan — I instantly knew this would be something special.
They gave me complete creative freedom, and that was the spark that started it all.
I played the song “Purtata”, closed my eyes — and saw the images unfold.
Barcelona, the sea, a festival, skyscrapers, clouds of pink light.
In my head, a story was born — one that I decided to tell in a single continuous shot, without a single cut.
The viewer had to feel as if they were on a visual roller coaster, where the camera never stops for a second and constantly moves through shifting spaces.
This video blends reality and surrealism — like a CGI dream where the impossible feels natural.
I was inspired, among other things, by Red Hot Chili Peppers – Californication, which back in the 2000s predicted the kind of digital aesthetics we now see in the AI era.
I wanted to create a psychedelic yet uplifting trip, where Potap finds himself in Barcelona, living through an entire story — from his arrival in the city to performing on a massive festival stage and watching the sunrise near Sagrada Família.
AI was at the heart of this process.
The entire video is an AI project.
I created an avatar of the artist based on his photos and then built the entire story frame by frame using Midjourney and a keyframe-based video generator.
Each scene was written, visualized, and animated — with transitions, camera motion, and rhythm worthy of classic film direction.
The hardest part was maintaining this “continuous flight” without a single cut — but when the first test scenes came to life, I knew: “This is it.”
The core message of the video is to never be afraid to experiment.
If you have purpose, faith, and consistency, you’ll reach your goal — even if the path looks insane.
Being a director in the AI era is like stepping into a world without boundaries.
Technology doesn’t replace the human — it extends them.
AI doesn’t tell stories; the director does, through vision and intention.
But now we have tools that can instantly realize what used to take months of production.
I’m genuinely happy to live in a time where imagination itself has become a production force.
And perhaps the warmest part of the project for me is a personal touch I left in the video.
I wanted to thank my girlfriend for inspiring me — so I did it the director’s way: by integrating her into two scenes.
She appears wearing VR glasses, then rides a scooter through the streets of Barcelona, and finally reappears as a DJ.
These are my favorite hidden references — two little moments of love inside a whirlwind of visuals.