My Final Fantasy | PhotoVogue Festival 2023: What Makes Us Human? Image in the Age of A.I.

Hello, ciao.

Thank you everyone for coming.

I have to admit that the last time I did public speaking

was in the 10th grade

where I was forced to read my homo erotic,

Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction to my entire class.

And my teacher stopped me halfway

and told me that it was gonna keep escalating

and that I should get off the stage.

So hopefully today goes slightly better than that.

That s my name.

My Final Fantasy.

So my work, and the reason why it s called this,

is because I have been influenced

by video games my entire life.

I never read Vogue, never did any of that.

But for the gamers out there, you will understand

the value that gaming has to your creativity,

your imagination,

and the depth of what you re able to do

if you tap into this for inspiration.

So I would like to begin with my work with Grimes.

I ve been Grimes co-creative director

for about two years now.

And then a lot of people ask

who is the other co-creative director, and it s her.

She just wouldn t let me call myself her creative director.

So we share a title together.

This is the first project we worked on,

which was for her album Book One.

It never came out, so like don t worry about it.

This was styled by Ib Kamara.

And my story with Grimes is quite interesting

because for probably my entire career,

anyone who asks me what celebrity I wanted to work with,

it was always Grimes.

When I moved to London in 2012, I had no friends,

but Grimes album had dropped.

So I just walked around London

listening to her music over and over and over.

And then in 2015, I moved to New York,

and again, no friends,

but a new Grimes album had dropped.

So I listened to Grimes over and over and over.

And so, she thinks this is really cheesy,

but she s been a huge part of my life,

probably since the beginning of my photography career.

I always knew I would end up working with her.

And so when she slid into my DMs, it was never a surprise.

It was just like, finally, like, there you go.

This is her.

And very much so, it is a partnership between her and I.

I can t take a photo if she doesn t approve of it.

She looks at every single picture I plan to do

and she edits it.

So what you see here is 50% me, 50% her.

A lot of our work is inspired by anime

video game culture, as you can tell.

To be honest, my entire career has been sort of interesting

because not a single person has ever asked me to do this.

No magazine, no creative director has ever wanted this.

It s just something that I kept doing over and over.

And with Grimes,

it was like we saw each other, really,

because she always wanted to do shit like this.

She hates press.

So I said, You know what, I m gonna come in

as your creative director

and we re gonna do everything together.

Every magazine, we control everything.

Styling, you will never have a team member

that we do not approve of.

So we did a whole press cycle through 2021 to 2022

where it was us, we ran everything.

This is for Atmos, which is an environmental magazine.

I think this is kind of crazy that this was a cover,

but this is what happens with us.

This story is based on terraforming

and obviously she has a lot of thoughts on that.

We wanted to portray a very fantastical vision of

what terraforming could be, bad and good.

This is, oh by the way,

all the CGI is done by Rodolfo Hernandez,

who s been my CGI artist for about five years now.

And he s the most talented person I know.

This is very much about her being on a spaceship.

And behind her is a bunch of factories on a distant planet.

She s a villain in this one, as you can tell.

We drew a lot of inspiration from Elden Ring,

Mortal Kombat, what else?

A lot of Final Fantasy,

a lot of Final Fantasy.

So this image is on the,

on that side is the good angel,

on the right is the bad one.

And so with this image,

we literally split the styling and hair in half.

The wig was chopped down the middle by my friend Dylan.

And so the styling is different on that side

to portray the dark side

and different on this side.

The wings are CGI.

I also should mention that none of my work has AI in it,

but I will discuss why I think AI is pretty great.

This is a campaign that we did for Dion Lee,

which was very much an extension of the album campaign.

We did this campaign for free

because it was a way to get this kind of art across,

because for us, money is irrelevant

when it comes to our message,

which is that more people need to be doing this kind of work

because I don t wanna be a niche.

I truly don t want that.

And I think that I have been labeled a niche

for a very long time,

when I feel like what me and Grimes do

is incredibly universal.

It taps into gaming,

which is the most universal medium out there,

across race, age, everything.

She was very naked for that.

And that s my favorite shot, the ass shot.

The Daily Mail wrote something about

Grimes bearing her ass for a photo shoot.

And it s my favorite headline that we ve ever had.

This is based on a video game, very,

well, not based, but it s very inspired by a game

called Nier Automata.

Anyone that s played Nier Automata knows

it is the most touching yet bleak game that,

probably the most bleak piece of media that exists.

This is a cover for Vogue China +.

This story was about the creating of her own worlds.

So this was the still cover,

and I ll show you the video cover later.

So the rest of the story is like this.

One of the things we do a lot with Grimes

is swords and dragons.

So I told her, you know, Pick one or the other,

cause we re not doing swords again

and we re not doing dragons and swords together.

She said, Let s do a dragon.

Let s replace the sword with a paintbrush.

I said, Okay, girl, let s do that.

So this story is not super based on video games,

but I suppose more based on like Chinese mythology,

a lot of Wuxia films.

Well, there s a little bit of Final Fantasy X,

if anyone here has played Final Fantasy X.

She hates when I say this,

but she is my favorite Asian American.

So this is moving into my work in music and fashion.

This is Hunter Schafer.

This is the first CGI work I ever did.

And we had to complete this photo in about three days,

and it was very nerve wracking, I have to say.

But it was a very fun and experimental process,

and Hunter s truly, truly

like an amazing person to work with.

I want you guys to remember this picture

cause I m about to talk about it.

This is probably my most famous picture

and it kind of goes beyond it visually.

There s a lot of lore behind this,

which I ll talk about very soon.

These are my first two Vogue covers ever

for Vogue Singapore.

That was for the first issue of Vogue Singapore.

And that was just something I did.

And then I told them they should make it a cover.

This is my work for Doja Cat and Spotify.

I hate that Spotify logo.

They asked me to put it in,

but now I look at it, I m like, okay, well it s kind of fun.

These are my two non Grime covers for Vogue + China.

They wanted to do an avatar called INFNI.

And so we replaced the model s head with a CGI mask.

That is a picture from the editorial.

This is a project I did for Nike and Concept,

which is a streetwear footwear brand.

This is probably the most on-the-nose

anime thing I ve ever done.

Like that s just an Akira reference,

which everyone can tell.

My work for Megan Thee Stallion for a VR concert.

And this is a project that I did with my friend, Guido.

This is one of my favorite things I ve ever done.

And actually I do think it s one

of the most valuable things I ve ever done

because it taps into emotion.

And I think CGI has this reputation

of being extremely cold and inhuman.

And when I look at these pictures, I don t see that.

I see a story that has loneliness and melancholia,

and I view this story with a lot of love.

This is probably the most famous series I ve ever done,

and it s the funniest story.

So that purple Hunter Schafer picture,

it was plagiarized by this K-pop company

called SM Entertainment, for their girl group Aespa.

K-pop fans found this information for me,

and in about an hour, I had 2000 DMs in my inbox.

They had found that Hunter Schafer picture

on the creative director of SM s Pinterest board.

So the next day I got an email from SM

with an offer of a settlement,

and I said, Yep, I m gonna take that bitch,

And guess what? I wanna shoot the next single.

The next single became a song called Next Level,

which was the biggest K-pop song of 2021.

It put Aespa on the map.

This is my work for Aespa.

It is very Final Fantasy influenced.

That planet is literally almost a one-on-one

inspired by Cocoon,

which is a planet from Final Fantasy XIII,

which is not a good game,

it just has really good art direction.

By the way, they didn t pay me that well.

The settlement was good,

but the actual day rate for this was not that great.

But it doesn t matter

because the influence that this project had on my career,

I can still feel it,

honestly, much more than anything I ve ever done in fashion.

This is the thing I will be remembered for

and I m kind of good with that.

Oops, oops, oops.

Let s play the videos.

[vines rippling in water] [sparkling ethereal music]

That s my motion cover for Vogue China + with Grimes.

And then the next thing you re about to see

is a trailer we did that was meant to be a project

between Grimes and Aespa.

And it was during the NFT boom.

We both knew NFTs were a scam,

but we still took their money to make this trailer.

There.

[upbeat percussive music]

[energy crackling]

[vocalist singing in foreign language]

♪ Utopia ♪

♪ Utopia ♪

[vocalist singing in foreign language]

[ship whooshing]

[mosaic rippling]

♪ Utopia ♪

[energy beam fizzing]

Oh.

[Bryan clicks tongue]

You know what? Actually this is fine.

I was gonna talk about this TV show I m working on,

but I actually think it s more important

to talk about what I think gaming

should be viewed as in this fashion industry.

We all know fashion is broke.

I flew here on economy, okay?

So this is what I m talking about.

Gaming has billions and billions of dollars.

It is an untapped market within fashion

and we ve all been doing it wrong.

I wanna do an example,

which is that Lucasfilms, Star Wars, Indiana Jones

was bought by Disney for $4 billion.

Microsoft bought Blizzard Activision,

which owns StarCraft, Diablo, Warcraft

for $69 billion.

Video games are the biggest medium out there,

and the fact that fashion turns its back on it

or views it as a lower art form is so crazy to me,

because we know brands don t have money.

I m doing a cover right now for a K-pop group

and we asked the brand, one of my favorite brands

and they couldn t cough up the money to do it.

But then we reached out to a video game company

and they doubled the budget.

So they want us to go into their world,

which is something that we should be viewing as

an opportunity instead of downgrading it,

which is what fashion does

when it does video game collaborations.

Video games taught me philosophy,

religion, literature.

They were all I had as a kid.

Everything I ve done here is because of video games.

It s not because I read Vogue.

That stuff doesn t matter to me.

What matters to me is the power of gaming.

Anyone here that plays video games, you enter this world,

you are forced to walk through the shoes

of these characters.

You learn different languages.

Every location has a lore, has a mythology to it.

Even the worst video games have so much depth to them.

Like an editorial reaches, what, 50 people?

Fashion is, at this point,

where we just communicate with each other.

It doesn t reach a wider audience beyond this.

Gaming does.

Things like gaming, K-pop,

that reaches a global audience.

I don t really care about being a fashion photographer.

I care about bridging gaming and fashion together,

bringing money into this industry,

inspiring the next generation

because the kids that come up,

video games will just be a regular part of their lives.

It s just something that they will look at

the same way we look at movies, music for inspiration.

And they re not gonna care about a picture of some girl

sitting in Bushwick in a denim sweater,

like drinking a coffee.

Just because you put a Vogue logo on it

does not make it important.

What matters is that these kids have access to everything.

They see the greatest arts being made right now,

and you can t take that away from them.

You can t.

You can t seal social media back in its box.

We know what is good, what is new, what s exciting.

So going back to these old modes of fashion photography

does not work because they know better.

And quite frankly,

the returns keep diminishing over and over.

Budgets get lower, brands give you less money,

and that is just not a problem with gaming

cause I have never flown economy to meet a gaming company.

That s it. Thank you very much.

[audience applauds]