Reimagining the La La Land Poster

When I visited LA last year, my friend and I watched a rooftop screening of La La Land — super cliche, I know, but it was really lovely too. Being surrounded by Los Angeles' glittering city lights against the deep-blue backdrop of the night sky just made us feel completely immersed in the movie. Adding on the fact that it's an absolutely stunning film in every aspect, from the acting to the production design to the soundtrack, makes that screening an experience I'll never forget.

Whenever I look at the La La Land poster, it brings me right back to that memory. So, when I was experimenting with the image chip, I wanted to see if I could reimagine the iconic poster in different art styles. Below is the original poster. I used the in-app image editor to remove the text and crop the image to square, which became my starting point for generating images.

The text prompt I used was:

I added the La La Land poster to the prompt via the image chip, and tried adding different style preset chips to translate the poster into other styles.

Here are a few of the funkier results I got.

I found that each image chip mode has its own strengths and pairs best with specific style presets.

Image influence was good for keeping the color scheme and simplifying style presets to their core elements, which was helpful when other modes produced overly complex results. I liked using image influence with presets that echoed the technicolor, old Hollywood visual style of the original film, as it wouldn't change the image too much but just altered the style of the characters and foreground.

On the other hand, depth and contours worked well with style presets that diverged more from the film's aesthetic. This combination allowed the style presets to influence every aspect of the image, including the color scheme, clothing, and background.

Compare the result of the gongbi painting preset when used with each mode, for example. When using influence, the image feels disjointed, like someone repainted only the characters in the gongbi style and stuck them into the original poster. When using depth or contours, the images feel more like real Chinese brush paintings.

Contours was also good at getting the pose exactly right, whereas the other modes might slightly alter the characters' poses.

Below are a few more of my favorite results I generated.