IOAI 2024 · Practical Round (set)
The Practical Round at the inaugural IOAI is a 4-hour team challenge: design an album cover and a music video for a real song by Bulgarian artist Maria Ilieva. Unlike the Scientific Round, no models are trained — teams use existing generative tools (SDXL, Midjourney-style, video diffusion, audio sync) and the score is artistic + technical, judged by a human jury. The spec asks for "creative use of existing AI tools" rather than novel research.
Round metadata
| Year | 2024 |
|---|---|
| Host | Burgas, Bulgaria · August 2024 |
| Round | Practical (Team Challenge), on-site |
| Tasks | Album cover, short music video (deliverables of one combined brief) |
| Duration | 4 hours total |
| Hardware | Team-supplied laptops + cloud (organisers credit) — variable |
| Allowed | Any commercial or open-source generative AI tool (text-to-image, text-to-video, audio sync). No bespoke model training. |
| Scoring | Jury rubric: visual quality, narrative coherence, audio sync, technical creativity [illustrative weighting] |
Tasks
The official brief is a single integrated deliverable, but for study purposes it splits cleanly into three sub-tasks. Treat each walkthrough as the focused practice you'd want before sitting the round.
Creative brief & storyboard
Listen to the assigned track, extract mood + lyrics, draft a one-page visual concept, lock down a consistent style palette before generating a single asset.
Album cover (text-to-image)
Generate a high-resolution square cover that reads at thumbnail size, fits the brief, and shares a visual language with the video frames.
Short music video
Storyboard → keyframe images → video diffusion / image-to-video → assembly with the actual audio track. Sub-30-second deliverable under a tight render budget.
How to use this set
- Run the round end-to-end once under a 4-hour clock. The hardest part of the Practical Round is not the tools — it's deciding when to stop iterating on the cover and start cutting the video.
- Pick one song you already know well, write a one-page brief in 15 minutes, and stop yourself from starting any generation until that brief is signed off (by yourself or a partner).
- For each generation tool you use, build a personal "prompt library" of 5–10 prompts that reliably produce the style you want. The brief tells you which library to pull from.
- Score yourself with the rubric in each task page before reading the "what top solutions did" section — you want to first notice the gaps yourself.