Work · Movie of the Week album, 2023 · 2023
Shakey Graves had hundreds of real recordings for Movie of the Week, including alternate takes and outtakes. We built a generator that could turn that archive into more than a billion soundtracks without inventing new music.
The stakes
Movie of the Week is a film score for a movie that doesn't exist. The record includes multiple versions of its songs, and Shakey wanted fans to assemble a soundtrack, artwork, title, and synopsis for their own version of that movie.
That amount of possibility could have washed out the part people came for: Shakey Graves. If the tool started inventing songs or treating his archive like generic input, the billion combinations wouldn't matter.
This was mid-2023. Nobody had a reliable playbook, so we had to make the boundaries ourselves.
The call
Every soundtrack came from recordings Shakey had already made: studio sessions, outtakes, alternate takes, and the different versions of each album track. The artwork came from his own library. We wrote the prompts for titles and synopses with him.
The machine could choose and arrange. It could not invent new source material. That boundary is what kept a billion combinations connected to the artist who made them.
01 · Start with the archive
Before the app could make anything, we had to know what it was allowed to use. We sorted hundreds of artworks from Shakey's library, cataloged multiple versions of the recordings, and built a way to serve all of it.
02 · Rebuild the CRT wall
Shakey's wall of CRT televisions appears on the album cover and in his live shows. We rebuilt it in Three.js so fans could move through the experience by changing channels.
The scene had to work on a phone too. The televisions resize and rearrange instead of asking every fan to open a laptop.
03 · Let fans make the movie
Fans picked a genre. The generator chose artwork from Shakey's library, wrote a title and synopsis from the prompts we made with him, and assembled a soundtrack from the recording archive.
Then Shakey asked fans to turn those generated ideas into real short films. The soundtrack generator ended up giving them something new to make.
The generator could make more than a billion combinations. It could only use Shakey's recordings, artwork from his library, and prompts written with him.
Three.js · GSAP
They presented a site that essentially was nothing like we envisioned, but was everything we didn't know we wanted. House of Giants pushed our vision because we understood their trust in their ability to bring us a site with tools and interactivity that we didn't know existed.
