"Echoes Of Vengeance" AI Project - Week 12 (tri 2)

In this blog post I will go over my process of creating the "Echoes Of Vengeance" movie in response to the assigned brief.

The Dream Itself

I have based my project on a specific vivid dream I had. I found this dream quite unusual as it was not only a nightmare (which I don't have very often), it also follows a story of a person that is not me nor is it someone I know. Quite weird isn't it?

"I had a dream that I was observing a girl who was also murdering people or has in the past and it was haunting her in the present as she was trying to have a normal life. I kept seeing imagery of monkeys only to find out she used to have a pet monkey who had mysterious blue glowing eyes, going from a glowing blue into a lifeless grey. But also the dream kept telling me that she had reasons for killing the people. She also had this internal struggle of am I a evil person? Interesting detail: flashback to man, presumably the brother, having multiple knifes holding him back to a toilet"

Building the Narrative

To build a somewhat coherent narrative, I have described my dream as much as I could to ChatGPT and asked it to build a narrative around it. To my surprise, the outcome was honestly much better than I expected! It made my main character much more sympathetic and the pet monkey much more relevant.

Narration

For the narration I have slapped the ChatGPT generated script into ElevenLabs. I used "Callum" as my narrator due to his oddly scary voice. Nothing much to add, overall ElevenLabs is amazing at what it does.

Concept Images

I have generated multiple concept images to get a feel of the story and it's themes. I have used DreamStudio to generate each image, and the prompts were heavily based on the script I have generated above. I mostly went for the photographic style as I wanted to keep my scenery quite realistic. Sadly, as I found out later, this process was completely useless as Deforum generates clips from prompts just as well. Regardless, I had fun experimenting with DreamStudio so no regrets here.

For the most part, the image generation went smoothly, apart from one, very frustrating issue. My story was meant to be quite dark, I mean the main character is literally a murdered. Every time I tried to generate something that was slightly dark the Ai immediately flagged it as "inappropriate". I know safety reasons so on but c'mon, I just wanted to have a girl standing with a knife. It also refused to depict scenes such as arguing, negative emotions, and anything else that could be seen as slightly upsetting. Interestingly though, it did generate a man laying dead on the floor?

Filming? AI Filming? Well, Video Generation

Once I had my images generated, all I had to do now is animate them. I have used Deforum for all the clips used in the final product. I found Deforum to be quite consistent with its video generation, and on top of that the 3D camera motion preset looks amazing. I must say generating exactly what I wanted was a nightmare, but after some time I decided to embrace the chaos and rolled with it's obscure generations.

I Hate Premiere Pro - Aka Editing

I have used Adobe Premiere Pro to assemble all the components. It wasn't a fun task combining all the clips together and making them align with the narration itself, but in the end I managed to make it work. I have used a dissolve transition between the clips to make them flow better with each other. After I was satisfied with the timeline, I slapped some subtitles in with the Premiere Pro transcription tool and it was done! Or so I thought...

After exporting the video and watching it through, I felt like something was missing. I aimed to make a scary video, but it didn't feel scary at all? After giving it some thought I decided to turn the whole thing into a VHS tape! There's always something spooky about those tapes, and to be completely honest I was quite influenced by the recent YouTube trends of making analogue horror. I have followed the tutorial linked below to create that desired VHS look:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=josO1SIKzaw

Additionally, I have overlayed some VHS effects on top of my video to add that additional touch.

Once I have achieved the VHS vibe, I moved on to adding some music (went with the FNAF one ambient noises as a little easter egg), as well as making the echo effect with the presents within Premiere Pro. Added some jump scares here and there, and the video was done!

Final Outcome

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlMxqMVAuXE

Overall, I am very happy with the final video! I found working with AI quite fascinating, in a way it made me realise how advanced AI became in the past few years. I really hope we get to do some more work with AI next year (also Matt if you are reading this, please come back in the future, it was such a fun module!).

One thing I am quite upset about is the transitions between each clip in my video. If I knew sooner that I was going to take this VHS direction, I would've created a VHS like transitions instead. Apart from that little miss opportunity, I think it looks decent. I am especially happy with the video distortion, yes it ruined the quality, but in such a great way!

Additionally, if I had more time I would've battled with Deforum more to generate more specific clips, but I think by now I have used enough credits...