Allow me to present my latest short film “Peripheral Neuropathy”

I started thinking about this idea about 8 months ago and even filmed a few bits to check and see if it was going to work.
I had drawn up a storyboard and planned out 80% of it but had hit a brick wall with how to end it.
It got shelved but kept bubbling away in the back of my mind every time I looked at the crudely hand drawn storyboard taped to my speaker stand.

Then text to image AI models exploded into my world, adding an entirely new tool to the toolbox.
Quite simple film making and some finessed After Effects skills had gotten me most of the way, could I leverage this new tool to finally get this finished?

I’d already been using Stable Diffusion on another short Directed by Martin Cooper to generate backgrounds for some green screen footage we had shot and was increasingly excited about the possible uses in other work.

There ended up being very little actual Stable Diffusion stuff in this film, but what has ended up in there made it possible to finish the film, something I was beginning to worry might not happen. It had helped in other ways by inspiring experimentation and ultimately provided a much needed creative spark, so deserves more credit than the amount of it’s inclusion would suggest.

I used the Deforum animation plugin in the Automatic web UI of Stable diffusion to create a low poly moving “field” to mirror the actual field seen in the piece.
I also used Stable diffusion to generate an image of an aged me from a video frame, I attempted to use EbSynth to map the image back onto the video but was not really getting anything I was happy with. I ended up using FILM to map the image onto the footage, which gave a much more satisfying result.

I knew it needed more than the natural sounds present to bring it all together and asked my long time friend and musical talent Danny Griffin to see what he could do, the only real brief being I didn’t want it to end up being like a music video. I think he absolutely nailed the soundtrack, adding so much more to the piece.

You can draw your own conclusions on what it’s about or why it has the title it does.

I’m very pleased with how it’s turned out. I hope you like it.

*Note to self: Figure out the whole story before starting something in future otherwise it just gnaws away at you :)*