Lightly edited from the recording for readability. Wording is the speakers’ own.
Hi guys, welcome. Welcome to today's weekly webinar. This week, we have our very own Sasha Zabegalin, Forward Deployed Creative here at FLORA.
Thank you, Olivia, Super excited to dive into my webinar today. It's all about creating this project that I did recently with partnering with Rhizome and FLORA, where I created this entire visual world for their 30th anniversary. And a little context for the event. Earlier last month, Rhizome was hosting their 30th anniversary. For those that don't know, Rhizome is a nonprofit organization that champions digital-born art here in New York, but also the larger internet as well. They needed all their visuals done for this event and reached out to us to help put that together, and Olivia brought this to my table and I was super, super excited to bring it to life and in one week I turned out all of these incredible visuals for the night itself.
It was a super large request and a really complicated brief to bring to life, but thanks to FLORA and our MCP feature and utilizing Codex as a driving agent to help bring these visuals to life, I was able to finish it all in one week timeframe. It was a lot of sleepless nights, of course. It was super straightforward, but we made it through all of it. These are the visuals that was made for the event: from the ambient screens that was playing throughout the entire night, to the anniversary title screens, to the slides of the people in the program, to even the sponsorship walls, to also the auction slides and even a live donation page where donations can come through from the benefit gallery.
But before doing Rhizome's project, I've actually had experience creating event visuals in the past. Back in 2024, right when I graduated UCSD, UCSD actually reached out to me to build an AI projector visualization for the World Design Capital Conference that was being hosted in the San Diego and Tijuana region. In this project I imagined San Diego and Tijuana in the year 2100.
I took POV footage and stock footage from San Diego and then used AI tooling to visualize it, to re-visualize it in this kind of future forward way. It was a really awesome project and was definitely the stepping stone to what led to Rhizome. With that, I want to dive into exactly the process of how everything came about with creating the entire visual world for Rhizome's 30th event.
Of course, like every creative project, it started off with a brief. Right after we agreed to doing this project, Rhizome sent over the brief, where they sent exactly what they were looking for with the ambient visuals, to the title screens, program screens, all that you saw a little bit earlier. They also attached all of their branding, their logos, their motifs that they were looking at Specifically. They were looking at this theme of botanical structures and so gave me a lot to play around there. As well as the color palette and taking all of that data, I, of course, have my Codex, my ChatGPT, connected to FLORA via the MCP.
Basically, if you don't know what that means, MCP is basically the ability to give your agent, like Claude or OpenAI or ChatGPT, the toolkit to one of your favorite tools. So I have my agent connected to FLORA, to Gmail, to Slack, to Granola, to all these sources of context for it to pull from. And my first day, right after I got the brief, because I was: let's just get started on something, let's, we only have a week to go, let's just let it, let's just see, let's just start. We got to just start somewhere, and so the first request that I had to Codex was to go into FLORA, pull all of the visuals and provided assets that Rhizome gave me, as well as ChatGPT to look through the notes of the meetings that we had prior to me starting on the project to pull from all that data and to prototype some initial visuals for the event itself. And the first initial visuals Codex, with FLORA, came up with felt really AI.
I didn't really like what was what I was seeing. I feel like it was doing too many things all at once and a lot of these visuals just felt in a way, AI slop. And, of course, partnering for such a really big organization and being one of the first AI tools that's getting to partner with a traditional digital art community, I wanted to make sure, like what we create and showcase as an AI company and AI creatives, that we were all about empowering creative and not producing slop creative excellence with AI augmenting the creative. I wanted to build something that was jaw dropping and only really possible with AI.
So I looked at these scenes and decided: okay, well, they're these. This is not working and, having done so many workflows and projects with FLORA and building with AI, I know that one of a good way to start a lot of the times is to create first individual mini assets that then you then feed as context to the models to build that larger world. So that's what I moved on to instead. So instead of trying to do the entire brief and all the visuals all at once with Codex, I just had it first, just concept mini assets across various art directions that I thought of. I told it let's go for kind of more lo-fi stuff, let's go for 3D shapes, let's go for wires and anything else.
So some of the projects can think of based on the Granola notes, the drive and all the contexts that I've had with meeting with Rhizome, and it created this huge, huge canvas filled with a huge amount of assets. I think it was over 11,000 nodes. Respond actually broke FLORA for a little bit. So I went on this project and you can see this is this is me at the office sitting down. Weber took this video of me reviewing all these assets is a pretty fun, fun little moment and looking at those assets, I was: they're fine, but just they didn't.
I don't feel like none of these felt like building blocks to like the larger creative direction I wanted to go into and I presented these to Rhizome as well and it helped a lot because we I was able to prototype and visualize a bunch of different things like the event visuals can go into, and having them review it gave me a bunch of ideas of where I can go next, because I agreed like none of these really felt like they were sticking and were the right choice of things and so I decided to, okay, let's, let's, let's do something else. And with that I just went on Pinterest and said, and I was: Okay, I wanted. A really good thing to do with AI is to provide a reference image for it to guide it into even better direction, because it has more to pull from, especially good references. As an artist and a creative, you always find great references to build onand that helps a lot, like that's what mood boards are for. So I went on Pinterest and what really stuck out with me is I really liked the Rhizome keys specifically and I was: there's a lot that could be done with that.
And I just went on Pinterest and I searched keyboard art and I found a bunch of various things: from these grape structures made out of keys to this kind of pixel flower, to these kind of wavy patterns, to mosaics made out of keys, to a keyboard kind of art where there's like a lot of things and text, to this like keyboards growing out of grass. I took a look at all these and fed them to Codex and asked it to build some visuals and FLORA, mixing both the Rhizome keys, the Rhizome colors, their typeface and make it feel on brand, and I fixed them into this like new version. And then this is where my brain really started clicking on. Okay, there's something here I really this botanical structure made out of keys. It's it feels on the brief, it feels like really accurate, It feels these feel all like visuals that could play throughout the night and build that larger world, of course, explore that wave direction, that plant like mosaic as well.
I also really liked the keys growing out of the grass. I feel like that was really really interesting. In that case, I actually told it, I told Codex to, instead of the realistic grass, let's go for artificial turf, because I felt, especially with their lime, their like lime green color, artificial turf would be like the best creative direction to go there. And yeah, with all that, again, I kept returning back to the motif of the Rhizome keys. Just, I went back on their website and their invites and I was okay, I think this is going to be what they like.
So I presented them, I presented this first direction again, after the massive creative exploration, the ideation stage, I was okay, we're converging. Now There's four days left. I got a. We got to converge now and start having like the initial prototypes of what is going to be at the event. So I presented this title screen, I presented a mock partner screen.
I presented some group like fruit structures made out of the keys to also even the botanical flower like structures. They really liked it. They did give me some feedback notes and I will take a look at what they said, but it really helped kind of nail down: okay, we're finally converging, the ideas are flowing and we're going somewhere. Now Some of the feedback that I got: I made basically the entire first direction decision. I just stuck with their lime green color because at the time I didn't know what color palette they were looking for.
And after presenting the lime green, they mentioned we actually use web colors. That's usually our like color palette motif for a lot of the branding and visuals that we do, and so I was okay, cool. So I started prototyping all those botanical structures as with different, various backgrounds of web colors, and it started feeling a lot more aligned. I also got feedback that I made a bunch of structures, not just these botanical ones. But I made the fruits, I made gardening objects, I made a bunch of things because I was okay, let's like really play around in this world of organic what other things can I make?
That's just not only like flowers and trees. But they said, let's, let's stick with the flowers and the trees. So, rolled with that, spoke with Codex, revise a bunch of things, continuing the direction. And after having Codex factor in all those, all those changes and requests from Rhizome, I had it build out. You'll see in a second once this zooms out.
I had it. This is the canvas that my agent built. But it built, I think, over 1000 different botanical structures of flowers and trees and I had a lot of options to look at. I shifted through all of them just to stand and picked out which were my favorites and really felt just the most visually compelling and interesting. So I moved them up, That way I can easily download them and then take them into the next step, where then the next step was, of course, animating these still images.
So usually what I like to do in my process is create all the imagery first, because then that's the basis for animating everything, because you want good, sharp visuals you feel aligned with before you start even bringing. What does it look like? Moving? And it's a video. So this was the initial prototypes of the animations.
I spoke with Rhizome with like what they were looking for, like how they wanted the visuals like moving, but like ambient visuals to feel and they mentioned the sort of stop motion like feeling. They sent me these like gifs of like Legos, like those old school YouTube LEGO videos of like stop motion effects, and so I took that context into Codex and I told it from Rhizome They talked about this sort of LEGO look. They also talked about this sort of stop motion feel. Can you look at those attached emails they gave where they sent the visuals and then build that in FLORA using Seedance? And so it started.
Codex started going ripping on that, started animating all those favorited stills that I had from all those botanical structures. And I kept chatting back and forth with Codex because the initial results I wasn't really liking the movement. It felt too robotic, It felt too AI looking at itand so essentially I kept giving it feedback. I mentioned the Codex like I want a stop motion feel, but an organic feel. I want these videos to feel like they're alive and breathing.
Essentially, I was thinking like I want the like the flowers to feel like real flowers, but with that sort of like synthetic twist to it where you had that like class, like a mix of both organic and non inorganic, and after a few rounds of feedback It finally started creating all the visuals. I also mentioned the Codex. I want each flower at each structure to have its own prompt. If I didn't use Codex to do this, it would really take hours to individually write a prompt for each. Still, but giving the high level creative direction, the Codex, to go on FLORA and do this, it was able to take care of that.
To go through a hundred something assets to individually write prompts for all of them, to throw them into Seedance, to animate, and so tested again, tested out a bunch of movements and finally picked out the 66 out of the 73 I ended up actually animating as my favorite directions and basically then at that point a lot of the ambient visuals were done of like I haven't edited them yet together and we'll show in a second how I bring I put them, put them all together, but I was okay, cool, I need to move on to the next step, because these, the ambient visuals- is honestly what took the most time, because I knew this had to be like a 10 minute at least, like a 10 minute long video, because it's going to be playing throughout the night continuously, so it can't just be like a minute clip or two minute clip that just loops around over and over again. It has to be something that you will continuously, something new, and if you really pay attention, after 10 minutes you'll notice that it loops back to the beginning. So I moved on from the ambient visuals and started working on specifically the title screens, and how I got started. The title screen is, of course, Rhizome provided their logo to me and I had the. As you saw earlier, I had that title screen of the keys and artificial turf.
They didn't really like that one. So I started to think through: okay, what's a different one? And they mentioned like they like lo fi. As you can see, this is their website on the on the left hand side. They like this kind of lo fi old school internet vibe, and so I was okay, let's, let's simplify this title screen to be exactly bare bones and exactly like what they were looking for.
So I just thought, I went to. I told: clicks, create, use their logo, create this like title banner in different, all the different colors that were previously from the structures, the botanical structures themselves of the pink, blue, green, purple- and it created each of those individual stills. I then thought to myself: okay, well, it needs, I have all four of those color images. I need an animation for it. I needed to bring it to life, but I didn't want to use like seed dance or something for this.
I don't want to use an AI video engine to create that effect. So instead just use Codex and had Codex code up the animation. It's sort of like custom actions inside a floor if you've used custom actions before, but it's custom actions inside of your agent itself. So I told it to grab all four of those Rhizome stills of this title, as you can see transitioning through all of them, and to put them all together in this kind of transitional phase, and took a while to get to this specific look and feel it just. The original prototypes were just it, just color.
Transitioning was a basic transition between the colors and I started thinking myself: this doesn't feel like up to par, doesn't feel too good. So I just opened their website again and started thinking through What is a cool transition effect and I noticed that, like how their website works is you have to like when you open up the website, you have to click on it a bunch of times and it does this like pixel blur out and I was like that's really interesting. And I also noticed that there was these like growing vines coming around, like growing a procedurally around the screen and I was like that's really interesting. So I was just curious. I gave Codex the website link of their website and told it: hey, I like that pixelated effect, I like that growing vines.
Can you do that as the animation? Pull from there, just be inspired by them and see if you can actually pull that actual, because I know it's a website so it's all in code. I was can you go into, can you open up the website code and pull it upand then you can actually pull out those green vines that they have. And GPT-6 was able to figure it out and it did it. I then kept creative directing it.
The original pixelated effects of the title wasn't just how I wanted it, so I was like: make it a procedural flowers. So if you can see each time the blurs happening. It's a different flower shape. And then I mentioned like I want black edging around, Just so it has this cool effect. And then told it, like the vines in the background need to keep growing independently and procedurally.
And I did it and I was like: cool, I have my title screen now. Like this is this looks awesome. And then I was like I have my title screen now. Okay, I need to edit together all of those videos I created about the botanical structures and I was having a hard time thinking through, okay, well, what's the transition effect between each of those video scenes? And so I did a few different, various takes and tests.
On that one I first thought, okay, well, what if I did like a keyboard, the keyboard keys falling from the top and it transitions to the next, the next structure. That was the initial one. And I was like no, it doesn't feel the same as the title screen. That feels off. I also tried this like I don't know fan folding effect as well.
I also told Codex. I was feel free to like. I gave it the two, the two you see in the first and second one. I gave it those two directions and then the third one. I told it like: feel free to explore whatever you think is the best transition, GPT.
And it came up with this fan folding thing and I was like:but the second request was when I was okay, I did that like sort of transition effect with the title screen of the flowers like bursting and the vines growing, I was let's what if I did that as the transition for all the, all the plants. And when I saw the, saw the one in the middle is okay, this is it, this is the one look, this feels now like I'm tying the ambient visuals and the title screens beautifully together. It feels like part of the same creative direction. But when I was, once I had finished that editing together all of all of those videos together and adding the transitions, I just remembered one of the feedback pieces I got from speaking with Rhizome was that, like they like things being a little not polished. They were, they really like the botanical structures but it felt almost like corporate or like too professional in a way when, their brand is known to be like digital underground scene vibes and like art stuff.
And so I was okay, Understood, that totally makes sense. And but I still really liked the plants, like in the botanical structure I made. And so I was thinking eventually, once they were all stitched together, I was okay, well, what can I do to make these like photorealistic, 3D almost looking objects feel a little bit more lo-fi and a little bit more internet, internety? And so I just looked at the pixel stuff that was that was prevalent throughout a lot of usand I was huh, what if I added this pixel like effect on the edges of the structures? Like what would that do?
And I just told Codex to go ahead and take care of that. And it did and it made this. And I was whoa, this is it like. I remember it was the day before the event too, and I was like stressing out. So I was like I have all this stuff done, but like this, the key hero, the ambia visuals, like The ambia visuals like it doesn't feel connected to the rest of everything that I've been making.
And so, once that effect came in, I was like so happy. It was like if it feels, this now feels like a creative world that I've built and not just this one out of place element. And yeah, I use Codex to do to do all of that with all the clips that are generated inside of FLORA using all of our various models. So it's really great to this kind of back and forth with, basically, my agent has the- I call it- the generative layer, which is FLORA. So when I need to generate new visuals, make new things from scratch, my agent can go to FLORA and use all of our models and all of our features and build there.
But then it can take it out of the generative layer and then use the agentic coding layer, essentially where the agent itself can operate and build its own tools. So that's how it I was able to stitch. I did all the video editing with Codex, all the transition effects, all those blurs and all those things. Codex coded up its own tools to achieve the requests that I had with it.
But once both the title screen and the ambient visuals were done, I started moving on to the live donation website that we were- I was asked to build as well- actually started that during the beginning parts as well, when I was first prototyping. Essentially the idea that the brief itself for this live auction screen was that they were thinking sort of: their goal is to reach 200 K donations from the night and they want it to be almost like a thermometer or like it can be dynamically adjusted until they hit their target. They wanted to be like fun. They mentioned that their dream version of this live auction screen would be like a pledge that would cause some sort of flower to grow and that, like we, they could even start the donations at the start of the, at the start of the dinner, so it could just gradually grow and grow throughout the night. And then they also mentioned that their own team would be manually entering the pledges.
So I was well. The only way to do that would be able to vibe code. So this is my first time like vibe coding something in a while. I haven't like vibe coded a project for outside of work or my own personal life in a minute. So I was okay, cool, I'm game.
I know the AI models have gotten really good at vibe coding, so let me just spill out my ideas. I connected the context of what we're looking for and had GPT-6 come up with these two websites, and these are initial kind of screen prototypes On the left. I thought to myself: okay, well, what if it was keyboard? The keyboard keys falling from the top of the screen when each person donated something, and if someone donated more there would be more key drops. If they donate less it'd be less.
So is that one of the ideas there? And then the other idea I had was a sort of like Windows popping up of each donation and each donation window had its own like effect. I presented this to Rhizome and they really like both ideas and they're. They basically told me what if you combine these two things could you explore that? And I said sure.
So I worked on a new version. It took a lot and a lot of back and forth with ChatGPT to get this right, but essentially it combined both of those motifs of like the keys and then the windows and created this sort of like operating system, like donation page, Where as the money someone donates, the, it fills up the gauge in the center console and in each donation would cause a window to appear where a procedurally generated botanical structure would appear in the window. That's unique and random for each person and you could even download that structure in its current state that it's in, because it will continue. It would. The structure continues to grow infinitely.
I told Codex to make it like that, so each donation has its own unique structure that will infinitely grow and if you choose to download it, it would save it on that current snapshot. And also this look for the donation page was also sort of a note. A note, a motif to FLORA, because I was, oh, this feels and kind of looks like a FLORA canvas, but it's like not on the nose. I didn't want that to be on the nose, so it's kind of a subtle hint to like the our node based canvas and that we're partnering with Rhizome to build out all their visuals. But also this like really cool kind of old school operating system view and vibe.
You can even see like how much each donation gift was and you can see like this one's a hundred thousand dollar donation. You can see it creates a huge window for someone to view versus like a smaller donation. It's a many year one and yeah, so yeah, each guest, each guest- could contribute and feel like when they donate something, they could take away something. That was kind of the thing I was thinking there with this procedural gendered structure and the ability to save it, because I was, OK, well, you donate this money to this really awesome event and organization Like you should have something to take home for your donation and your pledge. So I added that little Easter egg to be able to download and take your flower with you, your donation with you, to remember it.
And then what I also did, because of course the goal was to reach two hundred thousand, two hundred thousand dollars of donations for the night and of course, if that goal is reached, there should be some special effect that occurs when that goal is reached. And so I thought to myself: well, this is a sort of operating system vibe. Let's make it so that when that donation goal is reached, the system crashes, kind of owing to the old blue screen of death on like old Windows PCs back in the day. And so once two hundred thousand dollars is reached, the system crashes and it reboots Rhizome OS and you can see it reboots to all the screens. It was really, it was really cool to see in person, especially like on the big screen, and everyone's, like mine, was blown The whole time was like crossing my fingers and like praying this website would work because, again, it was vibe coded.
But granted, they were like it was just for the visual effects of it all. It wasn't hooked up to any like data in the back or anything, so it's more so the overall kind of layer. Luckily, nothing broke, so I was just really happy that everything was great.
And yeah, that was the website, the live auction website. Of course I had to make a visual for FLORA for us because Webber, part of our partnership, Webber did some intro remarks and I had to make some sort of cool visual for that. So again kept on that theme of the keyboards and was: oh well, what if I, what if our visual was the FLORA logo but made with Rhizome keys and then that same sort of transitional effects that was in the title and in the ambient visuals. And this was the result. I made the base imagery using in FLORA, using, I think, a Nano Banana 2.1.
And then took them out of FLORA and had Codex a rip on the animation transitions themselves, Even added this sort of Codex, figured out how to make the sort of animated effect to the keys themselves. It really blew my mind. It really brought this to life and Webber looked super, super cool on stage with this playing in the background as super happy. But outside of all of that, I also had to make decks across the board for the whole entire event from the people that were speaking to welcome the Rhizome. This is our 30th anniversary.
We have our president coming to speak, so had to make all of those people and program slides, as well as the auction and artworks screen, Just use. Codex told it to make it in PowerPoint. They attached all. The Rhizome gave me all the all the stuff for it, like what copy to say and what visuals to include, so I had Codex do that. I kept it very simple and minimal, because that's their whole thing, and so I didn't want this.
These the slides didn't have to be too chaotic and crazy, and in that so I was. Let's keep it simple, Let's just use their font, minimal type just, and go through each different web color, and Codex did a great job of that. This is creating the slides themselves without would take someone a really long time, let alone the entire visual visuals throughout everything. And because I have an agent- I have FLORA- I'm able to execute them, execute multiple collateral of creative work all at once in such a quick time frame. And then, of course, it was the day of the event, so I had to deliver everything.
I told my GPT to download everything, put it in a folder on my computer and then upload it to Dropboxso I could share it to the Rhizome team so that they could open the files and run the show with them. We came, me and Olivia came a little early to check it out to make sure everything was working. I was fingers crossing and hoping that everything worked out and it sure did, and we got to see it on stage before the event and deliver the assets to Rhizome in a super easy way. Packaging up your work and sending it to someone can take can be such a long process and chaotic, but with agents you just tell it: hey, can you package this up for me and then upload a Dropbox. It does that for you.
So those like laborious tasks that aren't part of the creative part of their process, the more production part- your agent can help execute that even faster. And yeah, this is what it looked like in the in the room. It was super surreal just to see all the guests experience the visuals in real time together, just to see my work and FLORA being shown to like such important people, a lot of really important people from across the digital art space.
We're here to honor what Rhizome 30th, and just to see my stuff on this beautiful screen just playing throughout the night and people taking pictures of it and smiling and being whoa made me so, so happy. Just to see that live and you can see this: what the presenter screens look like on the stage to how the speakers looked in the donation page. It was really, really surreal experience. And yeah, I did all this in one week using FLORA and ChatGPT Codex to make everything across the films to the program screens to five, coding the auction website in a week timeframeand it was all worth itand the end of it. I was so happy that night and, craziest part of it all, I posted my work on Twitter and I don't have a crazy big following on Twitter but it never hurts to post.
I always tell people you just got to post. You never know who's going to see itand somehow people- because people was at the event- actually noticed, found my tweet and DM me on Twitter saying the Rhizome stuff looks super dope and fresh and to keep crushing itand it was such a surreal experience to. He's been one of my idols in the creative tech art space and he thought my stuff was dope. So I'm wow, I really did that and you can see this is me on the. On the right.
Olivia took this great video of me standing in front of my work and being very proud of it. Yeah, I think this is one of my favorite projects I've ever gotten to do and to really push my creative limits across the board is the first time basically being a creative director for an entire event in multiple touch points at like a really big known space and especially for a community I care really deeply about of digital artists and nonprofit orgs are working on championing creative in this new age. Yeah, and it was so incredible. But, yeah, thank you everyone for joining me from for a case study on how I created this. All these visuals for Rhizome 30th benefit.
It was truly an honor of a lifetimeand I'm excited to make more. This is my case study now to get FLORA and more event spaces and to showcase like you can use AI to make really great creative work and also, like in a quick scale, using our tool and agents all at the same time to build awesome, incredible things that blow people's minds. And, yeah, thanks for tuning in.
