Cheater and Fiorio
animations for Love Dose Candles

Love Dose is a Brooklyn-based candle studio specializing in hand-poured, hand-dripped vegan candles, in custom and upcycled receptacles. Their goods are stocked at Urban Outfitters and sold on their own site.

"Cheater" and "Fiorio" are the names of two candles that have since been purchased and likely consumed.

The process: feed candle images to an artificial intelligence program with various text prompts like "human candle named fiorio; tinder profile" and "cheating candle; needs boyfriend." It's entirely unclear what exactly this does to the image, though we can rest assured it does something.

Place the resulting images, progressing from the initial, least transformed picture to the final product, into Photoshop as frames on a timeline, recolor, tweak with gradient maps and so forth... until satisfied.

Digitally hand-paint the unofficial Love Dose brand name design on a tablet. Adjust layer-style-emboss parameters on a frame-by-frame basis to create organic, stuttering transformations that mimic the effect of the AI.

Transfer the resulting GIF to Premiere Pro. Time-stretch (another AI-driven procedure) so interstitial frames are created, warping and fracturing the original material, simultaneously introducing more artifacts and smoothing the animation.

Unused material: "human candle named gerbs; iphone photo."