I wrote the music for this film in January 2020 – and then realized it was about what Huck Finn said about living on a raft. So I went to YouTube and found footage from a 1987 PBS American Playhouse made-for-TV movie – nice and impressionistic (read: fuzzy).
This year, I was playing with my Chat and figuring out how to do wide-screen “anamorphic” images. The effect was very interesting, and I thought about how such a sweeping view would work with “On a Raft.” As with “It’s a Usual Life,” I used shots from the previous movie as references for the new one.
But this time, I wanted some real drama in the middle. I recalled a scene from Huckleberry Finn where someone faced off against a mob. I looked it up (thanks, Gutenberg Project) and had to adapt it to a 30-second scene. Then I wrestled with shots from Generator and motion from Animator. Some were a complete waste of credits! I put it all aside for a while.
During this pause, I found OpenArt, which offers a whole suite of animation programs. And with a little finagling, I worked out what could be done for the least expense. My first experiment was showing Huck get off the raft and climb up the bank to a village. The rest of the scene moved on from there. At one point, the storekeeper is looking out at the mob, lifts his shotgun, and cocks it. I got the sound from the Animator.
I needed to stop the music for his speech, so I put a four-bar break in the song. When I edited it, the cock-click came just at the end of the music – followed by silence. To give a voice to the man, I recorded his words myself (on my smartphone) and laid them in while we see the back of his head. I’m not ready for lip-sync!
Now I had plenty of animation credits, so I moved the raft down the river, showed Huck and Jim laughing and trying to catch a flopping fish. These cut into the film very well.
The art of AI filmmaking is never as easy as the commercials claim – “a whole movie with just one prompt.” In fact, I was learning to discuss the action with my Chat first, then letting her suggest the animation prompt. She usually didn’t forget the basic instructions and kept Animator calmed down.
The film still has some AI-isms – stuff I missed or ignored, like too many men in the mob. But I was learning. Show little things, with little movements.