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The Scarecrows of Saskan: Live Action Remake is a single-channel video at the center of Leo Elia's ongoing cycle The Scarecrows of Saskan (2024–ongoing). It's based on motion-capture footage of Reenactment, a solo performance in which James Oldham enacted every character of Elia's original musical of the same name, filmed continuously on three cameras. That footage was run through an AI reference motion workflow, reanimating the characters, sets, and lighting in a visual language drawn from German Expressionist cinema, angular, high-contrast, shadow-driven.
The cycle frames itself as a fictional rehearsal stage for a 50-minute sequel musical to The Wizard of Oz. Its plot follows the 1939 MGM Scarecrow and Strachila, the scarecrow of the Soviet adaptation, swept by tornadoes into Kansas, which they misread as "Saskan." There they meet Buddy Bale, a third scarecrow who seems to know them though they don't know him. The musical turns on friendship, betrayal, rivalry, and the strain of collaboration between these versions of the same archetype.
The MGM and Soviet scarecrows read as two Cold War entertainment industries retelling the "same" story; Buddy Bale is a kind of remainder produced by adaptation itself. Live Action Remake extends this formally, re-rendering it through AI, a remake of a remake, each layer (theater to film, live body to motion capture, capture to Expressionist animation) carrying the same gestures forward while shifting register.
The work started with the raw footage of a three-camera continuous performance of the whole musical performed by one actor. Pose data (a skeleton tracking each frame of movement) was extracted from that footage and fed into a video diffusion model together with a static reference image of each stylized scarecrow character, so the model regenerates every frame as that character while keeping the original motion exactly. Facial animation was handled as a separate, second pass, driven directly by the audio track rather than the video. The German Expressionist look, is steered into that same generation step through the reference images and prompting. Generation ran on rented cloud GPUs for the VRAM headroom. Output was a single continuous video. Motion and character identity were treated as separable signals that get recombined, so the same captured performance could in principle be re-skinned as any character in any register without reshooting.
Leo Elia
Leo Elia (b. 1998, Berlin) is a German artist working across sculpture, video, performance, painting and installation. Elia constructs narrative-driven work cycles that explore cycles of belief and disappointment. Recurring themes in Elia's practice include the histories of advertising, entertainment media & emerging technologies, material symbolism, automation, the examination of nostalgic impulses, obsolescence, and futurity.
