The biggest part of this project was of course to generate all the aliens pictures.
And it wasn’t as easy as I thought! That’s because I wanted to follow some strict rules.
The images
PHOTOREALISM
The pictures had to look like real photos of real creatures. Not digital art of pictures you could see in a video game or a screenshot from a movie.
NO ALTERATIONS
I didn’t edit or crop the images. The point of the project was to try to generate exactly what I wanted with MidJourney only. No other step or tool involved. If the result wasn’t exactly as I wanted (extra finger on a hand, inadequate background, twisted leg, etc), I didn’t change the picture, I changed the prompt to generate another picture.
The aliens
ANIMALS, NO HUMANOIDS
The focus of the museum is about zoology and not evolved humanoids with a culture and civilisation. These type of intelligent aliens would probably not like to be shown as preserved specimens in a museum!
NOT TOO “CLICHÉ”
I wanted the creatures on the photos to look like “normal animals” (as much as possible) and not just B-movies monsters. I confess, I got some cliché monsters for the Beyond Nightmares exhibit, but for this page that was actually the point.
Text: Marie-Sophie Germain
Photos: MidJourney (prompted by Marie-Sophie Germain)