Olivia's Doc Blog

Brainstorming & Working with AI

Ok this project was a huge hurdle for me. I had a lot of ideas about where to go and what I thought AI could help me with. I made a playlist for inspiration. However, I was kind of disappointed with what AI had to give me. I had gotten inspiration pictures from pinterest and wanted to see what it could do with them. The videos that came out were bizarre, soulless, flat, or all three.

I had originally wanted to do something that took a person through someone's quasi-living instagram, where all the pictures would come to life. I still wanted the video to retain aesthetic and artistry. I don't take the comedy route for projects very often, and I wasn't confident doing that here. I wouldn't say that artistry and depth lend well to AI, and I was consistently unhappy with the content I creating. I used all 2,500ish credits for text-to-image generation in Runway and I didn't use a single one of those images in my final project.

I decided I wanted to do a cross between poetry and AI art, either using my own poetry or some writers I like. My poetry can be a bit gruesome, so I ended up not going that way, especially because AI doesn't do gore very well (and it probably wouldn't go over well in class). I remembered a favorite free-verse poetry book, where the author details these monstrous images that appear in her mind; she calls them the Nudes, which are not in any way pornographic, but often quite gruesome. I thought this would be a cool way to provide the text-to-art generators a prompt. I switched over to Adobe Express, Firefly Image 3, and was able to provide an image that would determine a consistent style. This is why my collection of images is as stylistically consistent as they are; I've attached them below.

Woman alone on a hill. She stands into the wind. It is a hard wind slanting from the north. Long flaps and shreds of flesh rip off the woman's body and lift and blow away on the wind, leaving an exposed column of nerve and blood and muscle calling mutely through lipless mouth.

woman caught in a cage of thorns. big glistening brown thorns with black stains on them where she she twists this way and that way unable to stand upright.

woman with a single great thorn implanted in her forehead. she grips it with both hands endeavouring to wrench it out

woman on a blasted landscape backlit in red like hieronymous bosch. covering her head and upper body is a hellish contraption like the top half of a crab. with arms crossed as if pulling off a sweater she works hard at dislodging the crab.

deck of cards. each card is made of flesh. the living cards are days of a woman's life. i see a great silver needle go flashing right through the deck once from end to end.

I cannot remember

white room with whose walls, having neither planes nor curves nor angles, are composed of a continuous satiny white membrane like the flesh of some interior organ of the moon. it is a living surface, almost wet. lucency breathes in and out. rainbows shutter across it. And around the walls of the room a voice goes whispering, Be very careful. Be very careful.

black disc on which the fires of all the winds are attached in a row. a woman stands on the disc amid the winds whose long yellow silk flames flow and vibrate up through her

transparent loam. under the loam a woman has dug a long deep trench. into the trench she is placing small white forms, i don't know what they are

green thorn of the world poking up alive through the heart of a woman who lies on the ground. the thorn is exploding its green blood above her in the air. Everything it is is has, the voice says.

ledge in outer space. space is bluish black and glossy as solid water and moving very fast in all directions, shrieking past the woman who stands pinned to nothing by its presser. she peers and glances for some way to go, trying to lift her hand but cannot.

old pole in the wind. cold currents are streaming over it and pulling out into ragged long horizontal black lines some shreds of ribbon attached to the pole. i cannot see how they are attached--notches? staples? nails? all of a sudden the wind changes and all the black shreds rise straight up in the air and tie themselves into knots, then untie and float down. The wind is gone. It waits.

i saw a high hill and on it a form shaped against hard air. it could have been just a pole with some old cloth attached, but as I came closer I saw it as a human body trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones. and there was no pain. the wind was cleansing the bones. they stood forth silver and necessary. it was the body of us all.

All of these images were given text straight from Anne Carson's Glass, Irony, & God. The artistic style was inspired by this image below:

Ophelia from Hamlet

Editing

I wanted to basically put the book on the page. I took some excerpts and then replaced those Nude descriptions with the corresponding AI images. I chose the instrumental of a song I really like and focused on clear text, little-to-no showy effects, and clear music-to-visuals timing.

Editing in After Effects

Glass, Irony, & God

Execution

I think the result is thought-provoking, and I'm glad I went in a simpler direction.