The Shining

Deep in the shadows of the Colorado Rockies lurks the Overlook Hotel. For its new caretakers, the Torrance family, the only thing more unnerving than their profound isolation is the realization that they are not the hotel’s only guests. Their young son Danny, with his spine-tingling sixth sense, endures the house of horrors while his father faces demons – past and present, real and remembered – that ultimately turn him into a monster. What starts as a desperate search for financial and marital sanctuary, spirals into a terrifying battle for sanity and survival. Adapted from Stephen King’s iconic novel, the Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning team of Paul Moravec and Mark Campbell bring The Shining to even more frightening depths than ever before.

The Shining was my first foray into a creating a design assisted by Generative AI in a significant way. Working closely with a team of animators and illustrators, we worked carefully to employ an ethical application of AI, training our own LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) on public domain and consent-based sources and employing union talent so that our work with AI did not replace artists, but elevated what we were all able to create together.

Directed by Brian Staufenbiel
Scenery by Jacquelyn Scott
Lighting by Jim French
Costumes by Alina Bokovikova
Photos by Cory Weaver

Here, we utilized a 3-step process to create the organic bowels of the iconic Overlook Hotel. First, a 3D Artist created a pipe environment which matched the geometry of our scenery. Then, using Stable Diffusion 1.5 and ControlNet, we were able to leverage AI to morph our pipes into organic shapes. Finally, we hired a traditional photo editor to isolate elements and an animator to make the organic pipes come alive, pulsing and dilating.

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