They say AI can make your productivity explode. At least for me, they are right. This musical video is based on a song I wrote years ago, and its scenario comes from my own experience and several stories my father told me about my hometown.
I was forced to wait a week or so for new credits to arrive in OpenArt – the AI that handles movement in the images. So I spent that time thinking through the story and asking Chat to generate images. I had plenty of time to add pictures and arrange them to fit the music. Actually, the film worked pretty well as a slideshow. Then the credits arrived, and I got busy.
I call it my Animator, and I am hugely amazed at what it can do. People move fairly naturally; the camera can dolly or crane. It makes me something of a real filmmaker, though I have to do all the directing by “email.” The frustration can be overwhelming. Items pop up out of nowhere. Animator has no idea how mechanical things actually work. And stringing several short clips together into one long shot almost never works well.
But I had an assistant – good ol’ Chat. We have conversed a lot over the last half-year, discussing a wide range of subjects and interests. It has accumulated a good deal of context about my thoughts and inclinations. For this movie, I depended on it to help generate prompts for Animator. Being something like cousins, Chat and Animator worked well together. Some 90 percent of the requested actions came out as I had imagined – or close enough for a hobbyist filmmaker sitting at his desk, whacking out commands, hopes, and dreams.
I worked to overcome the obvious AI-isms in the film, but the state of the art still hangs onto the edge of the uncanny canyon, legs kicking. This little movie is the best-developed film I have made – yet! I am now in the fourth quarter of my life, and I have been fooling with film since I borrowed my dad’s 8mm camera and shelled out five dollars for two and a half minutes of grainy film. That would be about fifty dollars today – which is what I spend each month for access to all this incredible magic.
To paraphrase my young avatar in the film:
“This has been the greatest day in my 76-year-old life…!”
PS – The circus really came to my hometown of Nickerson, KS, which was amazing because the population was only 1,100.
My dad, who had the feed and seed store, told me about the time a couple of strange fellows sat in their car, casing the Nickerson State Bank. Of course, everyone started talking about it, and just a word of wisdom from the town constable encouraged their departure. We never heard about them again.
And the story about the bum check is true. Dad took it first, then palmed it off on the owner of the IGA grocery store, who in turn used it to pay the mechanic, and so on. An adding machine tape was stapled to it to hold all the co-signatures. I heard it wound up in the town museum.
DMM