Frustratingly Good Bad AI

I have had this dream for a long time, of being a story teller in the visual medium.

I have dabbled here and there with miniatures, building sets, and even learning how to use Blender. My biggest obstacle has always been satisfying characters. Characters are difficult.

I tried my hand at clay sculpting. I had this idea that maybe I could do stop motion. But it turns out that sculpting is really difficult and I’m not that good at it.

I think my problem was scale. I tried to do everything in 1:24 scale, but that was really all that I have space for. It doesn’t help that I don’t have the eyesight for small details.

Modelling with card was a bit easier, but its not about the characters with the card.

Admittedly, some of these were made as toys for the boys, but I was working out a style, or trying to. These were passable toys, but no one would watch a video in this quality.

The last resort, though I never attempted puppetry, fabrics being way outside of my skill set and experience, was hand drawn illustrations.

I have used these hand drawn cartoon images to illustrate some of my articles, and with a bit of effort, it could work. Its definitely an option. With work.

The other option I was looking at for a while was 3D animation. I taught myself the basics of Blender, but I hit the same problem, again and again. People. Characters.

Its easy to build an office in 3d, its just polygons coloured accordingly. But people are difficult.

So there are options available to me, but with work and effort and swear words.

There’s also the other option that no one wants to talk about. AI.

I don’t like AI, no one likes AI, but is it an option?

I admit, I do use AI to assist with illustrations.  I prefer to use my own images, or stock, but sometimes I can’t find an image of something that I want because it doesn’t exist, or it does but its blurry or grainy or something. Not ideal, but its there, and AI can make it suit my needs.

There’s just no getting away from it though. Its here for good, so I’ve been playing with it to generate trains and some of the results are ok.

To anyone that knows anything about trains, these are terrible, but they’d pass, would they not, in a short film?

Maybe they would, so I had a go at creation something more sci fi, to see how it might work for one of my science fiction stories.

Or maybe I could make my own episode of Star Trek? I dreamed of doing that in the  nineties.

The results are a bit hit and miss though. The prompt doesn’t always draw what you have asked for. But you can animate your own images.

I used it to animate one of my own images, and the result was genuinely creepy.

I used it to animate one of my cartoons. Its not terrible I suppose. Its an option.

More recently I have been looking at the capabilities of creating fantastical places, but I keep running in to the same issues.

Here’s a bar on a distant planet, a million light years away.

So I then thought, what about the same place during the day, what if it was a wedding? A

I did not ask the animation to include audio. It added that by itself.  Do I have to specify everything? Including what not to include?

So I ran it again, this time to drop the dialogue, and instead give me a cinematic scene panning through the crowd and centering on the cross.

It went a bit bonkers.

So I tried again, asking it to keep it real.

And then I ran out of credits.

AI appears maddeningly good, but its also expensive. Who wants to spend that time and money on frustratingly close but unusable footage?

I think the time will come, but when it does, it will be too expensive for the likes of me, and everyone will be demanding authenticity in their art anyway.

Its a tough call. Seems like lose lose to me.