Chao Thao · Creative Producer · AI-Forward Filmmaker — 💻 Portfolio · 🔗 LinkedIn · 📩 Email

An AI-assisted memory art project I concepted, produced, animated, voiced, and shipped solo. A clear human hand on every creative decision.

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The Heavy Hearts Club

A memory art project where the words, the voice, and the source materials are human. AI is used as an instrument for labor and enhancement, always under creative direction.

Live at theheavyheartsclub.com

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How Heart 01 was made

How to read this

Every step is tagged so you can see exactly who did what:

• 🫶 Human — the source material, the creative judgment, the taste
• 🤖 AI-assisted — the heavy lifting: cleanup, enhancement, generation, iteration
• ✋ Human-finished — the final decisions, the hand-polish, the assembly

The short version is in each The work line. The tool-level detail is in Craft notes underneath — skip it or dig in.

The principle: Human-authored, AI-assisted. Nothing in this piece is invented by a machine. The story is real, the words are real, the voice is my own. AI never authored — it upscaled, generated on my direction, and accelerated the parts that would otherwise take days.

Phase 1 — Source 🫶

The work: Everything starts with something real and mine. A physical gold heart locket, mine since childhood. A page from my actual childhood journal, dated June 11, 1993. A floral pattern I drew by hand. And a background built from a photograph of Hmong fabric — my own heritage — that I chose deliberately as the “wall” this collection hangs on.

• 🫶 My physical locket — photographed
• 🫶 My real journal page — photographed
• 🫶 The floral motif inside the frame — hand-drawn by me
• 🫶 The background — sourced from Hmong textile, a piece of my culture, not a stock pattern