Making the world visible, and where the tools fell short

The visual rule was historically flavoured fiction, not fantasy with medieval props. AI-generated medieval scenes tend to drift towards oversized castles, clothes that are too clean and armour that looks like it came from a video game.

So the materials were fixed: wool, linen, leather, wood, stone, mud, iron, parchment and fire. The palette is deep Burgundian blue, dark crimson and aged gold, with fire orange and cool blues at night. The rooster reappears on banners, coins and a worn tapestry, but never as a logo in front of everything. The world should look lived in, not branded.

The two covers share that world without being interchangeable. The album cover is a landscape that acts as a way into the stories. The EP cover is a fire and a crowd.

For Maerten's streaming profile, the avatar shows him from behind. That depends less on reproducing the same face every time, and it fits a man who is always heading somewhere else.

What failed:

• One generated header had the artist's name misspelled. The rule now is that no critical text goes into a generated image. Type is set afterwards in design software.
• Faces, apparent ages and clothing drift between images. A hat with a faded red feather is not enough to anchor a character, so Maerten and Diederik need fixed character references.

Video. Nineteen short concepts were written, one per track (13 for the album, 6 for the EP), for Kling AI. The working brief was 7 seconds, 16:9, 720p. Each concept centres on one human gesture: a hidden payment, a hand pulling someone out of the mud, an empty chair. The album series starts with a banner being raised and ends with one person helping another. The EP series follows one continuous night.

Many of these prompts turned out to be miniature storyboards, with far too many actions for seven seconds. A short generation needs one moment, one camera move, one look. Loops need cyclical motion, such as flickering fire or a circling dance, rather than a clear before and after. Period details also slip.

What is confirmed and what is not. The concepts exist. That the videos have been generated, edited, approved and published is not confirmed.