SamuelWize - In The State of Becoming

An animated music video for a drowned civilisation, and for the diver who arrives four thousand years too late to answer it. The idea the whole film is built on: the song is sung by a flag, not by a person. So everything down there was built to fly something - masts, halyards, ceremonial poles, empty flag-sockets cut into stone - and the bioluminescence is the dye. Colour bled out of the banners into the water, the stone drank it, and the creatures fed on it. The ruins are lit by the pigment of dead loyalties. Six nations, six colours, and they are never allowed to mix except in the three places where the mixing is the point. The diver is never the subject. He is the unit of measure, and the only thing in the film that can still choose to leave. Every cut lands on a measured event in the music. Nothing was placed by eye. The vocal was transcribed and force-aligned against the lyric sheet, so all thirty-eight sung lines have a measured start and end, and the film is cut to those and to the six section boundaries the mix's own novelty curve finds. Three things came out of doing it that way, and all three changed the film: "I wave", "I whisper" and "I wear the wind like a calling" begin exactly 3.900 seconds apart, to the millisecond. So the figure in the porthole waves on a 3.900-second interval and lands on all three lines without being cut to any of them. A body does not keep time like that. The biggest moment in the whole mix arrives 0.19 seconds BEFORE "when I'm stretched between borders" - so the two currents collide, and then the words turn up to describe what already happened. The second-biggest transition falls inside a silence, between "Still," and "I wave." Nothing happens on it. Nothing was allowed to. There is no footage in this video, and no photography or imported artwork. Every frame is drawn by a program written for this song - the shaft, the columns, the cloth, the jaws, the thrones, the light and all of the water are generated, not filmed. CHAPTERS 0:00 The Eye 0:30 The First Banner 1:02 The Grid 1:17 Every Colour Sewn Into Me 1:46 The Hand 2:02 The Hall of a Hundred Standards 2:30 The Two Thrones 2:48 The Archive in the Jaws 2:58 The Border 3:14 Still, I Wave 3:30 Under No Flag But My Own 3:48 The Ascent HOW THIS WAS MADE This video is AI-assisted, and openly so. The lyrics are my own, written by me. The music and the vocal performance were generated by AI from a prompt I wrote. The concept for the video is mine. The animation is procedural — there is no hand-drawn frame anywhere in it. Every column, banner, tooth and shaft of light is drawn by code, and that code was written by AI to my direction and prompting. CREDITS Words — Martin Poole Music and vocals — AI generated, from a prompt by Martin Poole Animation and code — AI written, prompted and directed by Martin Poole Concept, art direction and edit — Martin Poole LYRICS In the state of becoming, I rise, I fall, I bend Like cloth caught in a restless wind, a banner of stories I never meant to carry, pulled left, then right, in currents I don't control. The fabric ripples, a trembling breath through threads worn thin, and every colour sewn into me sways in arguments of allegiance, fluttering, faltering, flowing. I've stood under too many flags, watched them claim the sky, watched them claim me in their shadow each one demanding a different truth, each one asking me to fold into shapes that were never mine. The wind keeps changing, and I sway with it, a testament to motion, to pressure, to breaking and remaining. What state am I in when I'm stretched between borders, when my edges fray from salutes I never wanted to answer? Still, I wave, I whisper, I wear the wind like a calling hoping one day to stand beneath only the sky, under no flag but my own, and finally feel the breeze as freedom, not command. He does not cut it down. He does not take it. Leaving it there is the point. #SamuelWize #InTheStateOfBecoming #AnimatedMusicVideo #AIMusic #AIAnimation #ProceduralAnimation #UnderwaterAnimation #LostCivilisation #DrownedCity #OriginalSong #IndieMusic #AIArt #MusicVideo