- Identify 3 models on Runway ML (or another tool) you are most intrigued by and a concept for each of them that could be used for this assignment. Write a blog post explaining the 3 models and the 3 concepts. Be prepared to discuss in groups in class. Due: Class 5
- Present your experiment in Synthetic Media and submit the documentation to your blog. Due: Class 6
Concepts:
Idea A:
- Video where we remove aspects (ghosts?)
- Something else / end of the world dystopia
- Music - something somber with Morgan Freeman narrating?
- Ghost Character is exploring their world, and realizing there is not much left
Idea B:
- We had very different opinions on the haunted circus piece shown in class [replace with title here] but decided it could be an interesting concept to feed to AI
- The circus is often called a “freakshow” - what kind of creepy or “freaky” images and sounds could we weave together as a “circus act”
- The character starts in a more “normal” place and things get weirder as the night at the circus continues until it is no longer recognizable
- Using images to create the story of the day in the life of a circus character
Idea C:
- Audio piece - letting the AI create the story
- Start by feeding it a “normal” story start line (like “once upon a time”) and seeing where the AI goes with it. We would try to limit our influence once it got going
We did not exactly stay within a singular concept that we came up with last week - as we experimented with the various programs, we decided to iterate off a combination of the first and third.
Creating the Story
We took a spooky, ghost and halloween vibe, and let an AI create the haunting short story. We played with several iterations of this using the program InferKit. Unfortunately, InferKit didn’t say which model it was trained on, but I am still trying to figure it out.
InferKit allows you to add key words, so I played with adding a variety of spooky, creepy, and halloween related words to push the text generator towards writing a haunting and seasonally appropriate story.
Narrating the Story
Once I had a short story I liked, I then fed it to a text-to-speech reader to have the story told to you by an AI voice. At first, I thought it would be more creepy to have a human actor read the story out loud, but honestly, I think having the AI voice read the AI story is almost more chilling to hear. It makes the computer seem like it is coming to life to haunt you.
Giving Visuals to the Story
After recording was finished, I also pulled DreamStudio images based on the text so the audience could also view visuals that fit with the vibes of the story.
Lita used her Adobe Premier magic to pull it altogether into what you can view below:
Hypercinema 1.MP4