Introducing Intemporel: bringing the past to life

■ Introducing my new YouTube channel, Intemporel.

I’m currently working on my first full music video. It is a great deal of work, but also quite thrilling. Its soundtrack will be some of the pieces from Innocent Games, and it will introduce the album’s two main characters, Maeve and Tomáš.

Since the album was inspired by a story I wrote, I thought it would be interesting to give that story a visual form.

After creating the main characters, with Maeve’s appearance based on the album cover, I began animating them within its settings and scenes. Seeing what could be done with the help of AI gave me an idea.

Over the years, I have collected old photographs of people and cities from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: images I love returning to from time to time. To me, they possess not only character and charm, but also meaning and emotional power, much like works of art.

So what would happen if I tried to animate them?

I made a few experiments, using painted portraits and vintage photos, and the results were amazing. I’m now working on a series, as a side project.

The first clip is about French women painters from the 18th century. These women achieved recognition in a cultural world that offered female artists far fewer opportunities. Some remain familiar today, while others are known mainly to specialists.

Above, a detail of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s Self-portrait (1790).
Below, the same portrait interpreted by Ideogram, and animated by Luma AI.

These animations are not intended as historical reconstructions. They are visual interpretations inspired by surviving portraits, created to suggest how these women might feel as living presences. Animation can reveal facets of character that a fixed painting leaves to the imagination, which I find fascinating.

I will publish this series on YouTube as I go. The channel is called Intemporel. The name is French for timeless. It seemed appropriate for a project concerned with images that have survived their original moment: old paintings, early photographs, and the faces of people who lived centuries ago.

The soundtrack comes from Innocent Games. Although the album was conceived around a journey through Tibet, the selected music accompanies this succession of portraits quite well. It gives the sequence continuity and allows the images to unfold without narration.

This is one reason Intemporel and Sylvan can exist alongside one another. The films offer another setting in which the music can live, while the music gives the historical images an emotional space beyond straightforward documentation.

The first video is available here:
French Women Painters of the 18th Century — Brought Back to Life