ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AFTER WE GO - A video generated with MidJourney, Kaiber, and Runway
The premise of this AI-generated video is a hypothetical future where humanity, after rendering Earth near-inhospitable, decides to leave it behind. The aftershock effect of humanity's departure is that Earth is mutated, along with the animals left behind. The animals inevitably become the new dominant species.
To make this video, I generated images with MidJourney, and then animated those images using Kaiber and Runway.
MidJourney has a function to describe existing images in an "AI-friendly" format, and I could feed elements of its description back to the AI to get exactly the kind of image I'd want.
The idea developed from a song called 'Tomorrow's Dust', whose main theme is regretting a future that has yet to come. One particular lyric refers to climate change and our effect on the animals of Earth:
Sympathy for the fauna
Fragile life in the sauna
Fragile life in the sauna
The instrumental version of this song ended up being used as the backdrop for the visuals.
What I learned the most in this process is that AI is training us as much as we are training it.
SELF PORTRAIT - An image generated with MidJourney
This was an attempt to capture my personality as best as possible with the help of Artificial Intelligence. For starters, to capture my appearance, there are tools in MidJourney that allow me to upload reference pictures of myself to MidJourney, but I avoided that notion.
Instead, I used actor, Jon Heder, as the basis of each attempted prompt. That's mainly because I have often been compared to him in appearance. In this case, I can pass off Jon Heder as myself.
I also knew I wanted it to have a somewhat Western energy to it: hand-drawn, cowboy-esque motion, and brownish tones. So stylistically I incorporated the oil-painted, yet hand-drawn style of Brian Cogman.
In terms of motion & personality, I aimed to convey a sort of anxious skip/jump. The effect it produced ended up surprising me in that it added this level of dancing to the character, reflecting my love of music
