City Lights, New Realities: Inside the AI Revolution of Music Visuals
How Holybrune, Maëva Jaouen & AI Artist Amélie Lolie Used Technology to Reimagine Music Storytelling
On November 16th, the historic Los Feliz Theatre transformed into a cross-cultural convergence point for the AI International Music Video Festival—founded by Bert Holland. The room hummed with creative energy as musicians, directors, dancers, technologists, and AI visionaries from around the world gathered to witness the next evolution of music-driven visual storytelling. It was the kind of day where digital experimentation met emotional truth, where artists proved just how expansive the boundaries of music visuals can become when freed from traditional filmmaking constraints.
At the heart of this cinematic surge stood "City Lights," the neon-soaked collaboration between French artist Holybrune, director Maëva Jaouen, and AI artist Amélie Lolie. The work swept the evening, earning Best AI Music Video, Best AI–Human Collaboration, and Best Performance by a Music Artist—a trifecta that signaled something profound about where music visuals are headed.
THE VISUAL REVOLUTION IN MUSIC
In today's music landscape, visual innovation has evolved from luxury to language. Artists now work beyond the limits of physics, budget, and geography. Instead, they're entering a space where imagination becomes the primary director, where visual freedom represents the new creative frontier—granting musicians the power to translate emotion, memory, and fantasy into fully immersive worlds.
The rise of AI has accelerated this transformation. Not as a replacement for human creativity, but as a visual amplifier—a tool that helps artists step deeper into their own mythology. It's enabling musicians to build universes instead of just videos, guiding audiences through alternate dimensions, dream logic, emotional memories, and cinematic landscapes once impossible to film without million-dollar CGI teams.
Few works embody this evolution as vividly as "City Lights," a film born from nostalgia, lived experience, and a shared love for Japanese culture—one where human intention and AI-driven visuals converge in dreamlike harmony.
THE ART OF "CITY LIGHTS": HUMAN FIRST, TECHNOLOGY SECOND
For director Maëva Jaouen, AI is not the storyteller—it's the brush.
"Human imagination always comes first," she explains. "AI can surprise us, but the artistic intention is shaped by the humans behind the tools."
The team deployed AI not as a shortcut, but as an extension of their vision, threading it through every stage:
Moodboarding – Exploring visual possibilities and emotional textures
Production & visual scouting – Discovering and creating locations that exist between reality and imagination
Post-production visual design – Refining and enhancing the final aesthetic
This human-first, tech-second philosophy mirrors movements in fashion, where artists and houses like Songzio, Gucci, and Alexander McQueen embrace AI aesthetics while keeping creative direction firmly in human hands.
THE HEARTBEAT OF THE FILM: HOLYBRUNE'S RETURN TO TOKYO
"It was like meeting again with a lover you never stopped loving… I drifted through my old memories and created new ones," Holybrune recalls.
For Holybrune, the project transcended the music video format—it became a reunion. A return to the city that shaped her, filtered through a visual vocabulary finally capable of expressing the depth of her nostalgia.
"Technology allowed us to set a fantasy in motion," she reflects. "AI becomes a way to translate feelings into images."
FESTIVAL STANDOUTS
JUNHO HER — "UNCHAINED GOLD"
Awards: Best Use of AI in Music Composition, Best Storytelling / Narrative Video
A molten, gilded chronicle of a woman clawing her way through poverty, ego, and oppression. Inspired by Gustav Klimt's golden period, the film balances beauty and brutality with striking tension, creating a visual experience that's simultaneously gorgeous and harrowing.
JOY PURDY — "DANCERS IN SUMINAGASHI"
Awards: Best Experimental, Best Choreography, Best Art Direction
A hypnotic meditation on control and surrender, set to Ken Weissman's orchestral score. Suminagashi ink becomes motion itself—liquid, expressive, alive. The work explores the space between intention and accident, where traditional Japanese marbling techniques meet contemporary dance vocabulary.
SIMON MEYER -PERFECT
Award: Best Use of AI in Visual Creation
A masterclass in technical precision and existential questioning. Using tools like Seadream, Seadance, and AI-polished lipsync, Meyer built a character-driven universe with technical clarity and emotional sharpness. The film depicts an AI singing a song that asks to exist—a meta-commentary on artificial consciousness that transforms technical showcase into philosophical meditation. By centering the AI's plea for existence, Meyer creates a poignant exploration of what it means to be created, to yearn, to seek recognition as something real.
Italian visual artist and musician Piero Fragola's 'Cold and Dim' captured both Best Music Video and Best Cinematography for its striking monochromatic visual craft - Visual will be updated upon release.
A NEW ERA EMERGES
The truth revealed at The AI International Music Video Festival is elegantly simple: AI doesn't make the soul. Artists do. AI simply enlarges the canvas.
From Tokyo nights to marbled ink, from golden liberation to existential AI yearning, from perfect lip-sync to imperfect human longing—this festival revealed a new creative ecosystem where human experience remains the core, and AI becomes the bridge to unexplored frontiers.
The future of music storytelling isn't approaching. It's already here, glowing on screens, pulsing through speakers, reshaping how we translate sound into vision, feeling into form.
The question is no longer whether technology will transform music visuals. It's how deeply artists are willing to dive into these new possibilities—and what worlds they'll build when they do.