I know, my AFK time has been excessive as of late but as usual it doesn’t mean that I’ve been idle. I had some new adventures, got busy with some undercover work (more on that later), and stuck my fingers into far too many pies.
Take the thing above, for example. Figured I’d try something different but new directions always come with a price. Don’t even get me started about inflation!
Anyway, this tune is supposed to be Chopin’s Nocturne No.20 in C Sharp Minor … or at least what’s left of it.
I’m happy with the result but much of the process is manual so I may have to spend some time slapping together some automation for the next installment.
I’ve been thinking about producing a more immersive rendition of /sectionb. I’ve also been thinking that producing a “Parapsychological Spy Thriller” via conventional means is not be the correct approach. It needs to be a little more artsy, interpretive, associative. Unfortunately, illustration and animation aren’t really my thing.
Although I can draw some basic proportions and I try to pay attention to composition and colour, I can’t produce the type of visual output that modern artificial intelligence can. But as it happens I also dabbleincode so it wasn’t long before I was fucking around with Stable Diffusion and similar software. Unfortunately, if I wanted to use the AI to produce short films the still images it spat out would need to be animated using something like morphing — doable but laborious.
By one propitious circumstance a fairly recent upgrade to Stable Diffusion by Deforum popped up in my search results one day and as soon as I saw a few samples I got giddy. Not only is the animated output of DSD dream-like and trippy, which is very apropos for /sectionb, it also improvises around the periphery of supplied prompts/themes in surprising ways, which is also quite apropos.
Initially I tried adding voice narration but it just didn’t fit so instead I converted the text to subtitles/closed captions, chucked in some original music, and after that the video basically just produced itself.
... with pictures
... with sounds
... with videos
... with opinions
... that's shorter
... that's longer
