My great-grandfather was a Quaker – a pacifist by faith – yet he joined an Iowa Volunteer Regiment to fight in the Civil War. According to our family history, he was a flag bearer, which was an incredibly dangerous place to enter a battle. His unit was involved in sieges, most notably at Vicksburg. Fortunately, he was not called to lead the charge into the breach.
At the end of the war, he was with the soldiers who went to Galveston and Houston when the Emancipation Proclamation was presented to the former slaves – Juneteenth.
On returning home to his Quaker community, his participation in the war was not roundly accepted. So he and his wife, Sarah, traveled to the Flint Hills of Kansas to homestead. They nearly starved there – and finally he got on with the Santa Fe Railroad as a lineman.
So, this is the part of the story I am borrowing for this movie – the homestead, the problems, and the railroad work. These are fictional characters, John and Mary, but the shape of the story is there.
For this work, I continued to use “AI.” Again, the form was mostly still images that moved with zooms, pans, tilts, and transitions. Even this caused frustration – especially when I had a particular image in mind. I call the part of AI that makes the images the Generator. And Generator has some definite ideas of its own. Who says AI doesn’t want to be creative?
One particular scene in the railroad yard was to show a fellow worker being crushed by two boxcars as he tried to put the pin in the coupling. It refused to do a direct, deadly shot, and other suggestions couldn’t create what I wanted.
So I went to my editing program, VideoPro. The same movement that made still pictures come alive could be used on various “plates.” The background had one box car and the guy. Another was just the other boxcar. A third plate had the hero, John, and another fellow talking and not watching. So the moving boxcar rolled behind them. A cut to the car coming at the camera. Then a crash sound and the shocked faces of the two guys. Lastly, a funeral procession.
Creating always requires working with materials that have their own problems. One has to work with oil paint for years to get the images the way the artist actually wants. And – the artist must truly appreciate how the medium behaves, and shape the imagination to match.
The skills began to show in this movie. It was a good second step.