So my final video went over 2 minutes, but it still stayed within the 2 minute range so hopefully Aggressive Technologies doesn’t kick me out of their conference.
My goal with this video was to purposely make it spontaneous and free flowing. I realized that the majority of my output in this class was meticulously planned and scripted out. For a reflection video such as this, I wanted to let all of my thoughts out in free flow, but this also made it difficult to keep it under 2 minutes as I’m a rambler.
What a crazy few months it has been. From our humble beginnings with setting up our blogs and writing film reviews, all the way to making collaborative radio shows and final projects that showcased all of the different technologies we worked with. This class has been an adventure that I would have never imagined back in January, and I’m grateful for all of the lessons and experiences I had.
Thank you to Professor Bond for steering us in the right direction every week without limiting our creative scopes. I hope to take the skills I learned to enhance my work in the future, as well as my daily life.
For my video project, I decided to continue Hwei’s story and give some context as to what drove him to absolute madness. After being fed up with Aggressive Technologies and their mass expansion and brainwashing of the world, Hwei decides that he must become an example of what humanity can achieve if they choose his route and embrace AI.
Like I said before in last week’s summary post, Hwei has never been animated to talk in front of a camera, so I had to find a mad genius look-alike in the League of Legends universe to fill in. I had to get clips from the movie Arcane, and there were plenty of clips of the mad scientist Viktor, who is actually the embodiment of Hwei’s character in its entirety (other than being European and not wearing robes / being artsy all the time).
Since the whole premise of my story was to show that initial human side of Hwei then transforming into a robot, I recorded my own voice with the script I wrote to really sell the idea of human becoming something different entirely.
I used Wav2Lip for the second time now, and it was just as disappointing as last time. Not sure if I’m doing anything wrong, but it seems as though the lip syncing is never up to my standards. There are a lot of parts where I am not speaking, yet the algorithm moved the model’s lips. I also couldn’t find a continuous 50 second clip of him just talking, so the 4 second clip I used kept looping over and over, which didn’t make it very realistic.
I got all of the video clips from YouTube, but I noticed that the YouTube to video file generator I used reduced the video quality tremendously. The entire video looks 480p, and I think I’ll try to find some ways to download crisper videos for the final project.
Just like I did in the Radio Show, I had a lot of fun syncing up the different music and voice line files to create dramatic effect. The black screen before the transformation cutscene signified a shift in atmosphere, along with the new music track being added in tandem. When Hwei touches the ominous purple device, jolts of lightning come into frame as the scene cuts again with the music at the perfect timing, and a picture of robot Hwei (Which is actually a portrait of Viktor) comes in. The voice lines were taken from YouTube, and since they were voice lines from the video game, I had to splice together a few lines in audacity to make a coherent “villain announcement” segment.
Luckily I had no issues with copyright music or clips like I was worried about last week, and I hope it stays that way so that everyone can still view the video! Overall this process took around 2 hours and I definitely have some takeaways for the final project moving forward.
For my design for our radio show, I decided to do a show poster / logo that would compliment our topic.
Logic Pod: The Tech Podium is our podcast name. A lot of our initial discussion for our show was about how intellectually sophisticated our characters were. This made us think of a brain as a visual implication of intelligence, which is sort of ironic when all of our characters are talking about AI in some way, which does not function with a physical brain. The “logical” side of the equation is shown by the brain, while it is supported by a microphone stand. The overall background color green allows for the pink brain to pop, and I think that it looks aesthetically pleasing.
I used a website called Brand Crowd to enter the title, and the AI seemingly worked it’s magic and gave me hundreds of pages of logo ideas. I initially attempted to design one myself, but I got frustrated trying to use my nonexistent web design skills and leaned towards using a tool instead. Despite using AI, I think this logo looks quite nifty and is very fitting for our show.
My name is Hwei, I am a researcher of sorts and I’m here to pitch a product that you may be interested in acquiring. As much as I disagree with your grandeur plans of acquiring the world by becoming a megacorporation that controls all, I am in dire need of funding for my project, and would like to sell this product to you at the right price. Again, I am not suggesting that I am supporting your endeavors in further expansion. I am just doing what is necessary for my own vision.
Synthesia is an AI audio and video generator that uses preexisting human-like models and takes in text to create a speech video. The human model can be adjusted to meet specific requirements such as gender, age, height, and type of voice. There are already a few preset backgrounds and specs as well, such as the sales pitch and compliment modes.
This tool can be used for Aggressive Technologies to further cut costs on physical front end marketing teams and to hone in on the calculations and strategies to sell products to a wide range of customers. As AI becomes more commonplace and prevalent in the market, I believe that society will come to accept AI models as the new norm, and will be receptive to the new style of marketing and public outreach.
This is an example of what this application can do for you. If you’d like, please reach back out and I’ll be happy to negotiate pricing with you. Just know that this is a piece of my revolutionary research that your corporation could never replicate, so please make sure you think over this carefully and make the correct decision.
This poster resonated with Hwei, as he is also pushing for the acceptance of AI. The visual representation of how humans and AI can be linked in the mind and body directly aligns with his research. While Hwei’s initial goal was to create an entirely new robot civilization that would attain absolute perfection, Isaiah Beacon and his activism towards creating unity between AI and humans is an interesting idea that piqued Hwei’s interest.
The potential for humans to be turned into robots in the future is something that Hwei might experiment with in the future. The only concern would be the potential ideological clashes between the two individuals, as Hwei will prioritize AI prospering over humankind, no matter the circumstance, while Isaiah would like both entities to coexist.
Regardless of the outcome, Hwei would like to collaborate with Isaiah Beacon in the future to push his own agenda even further.
I created a public service announcement based on something my course character would put out to the world. Here is the script:
This is a public service announcement. I repeat, this is a public service announcement. In approximately the next 5 years, our lord and savior Hwei will be bestowing upon this world, a new life form. To prepare for the coming of the new civilization, please remain calm and accept these new beings into your lives. In the meanwhile, please boycott the Aggressive Technologies corporation, as they are actively working towards the downfall of mankind. Again, please do not support their corruption, and welcome the new civilization with open arms.
I used a few basic tools we’ve used already in this course to create this audio. I first went to freesound.org to find an eerie robot backtrack that would aid in the atmosphere of this PSA. Then I did a quick search for a robot AI voice generator that would read out the script for me. Finally, I spliced it all together using Audacity and exported the file to upload into SoundCloud. All of these tasks were pretty easy to put together, since all of this work was practiced during the audio focused segment of DS106, which helped out a ton.
For context on the PSA, my course character Hwei sent out one of his robot creations to signal the coming of his new civilization of perfect automated beings. As he prefers to avoid being in the spotlight as of yet, he programmed one of his loyal servants to be his messenger. The script almost feels like the coming of Christ and Christianity, and the background noise gave it an eerie twist.
The denouncing of Aggressive Technologies and the reasoning behind it is a reflection of Hwei’s delusions and blind hatred towards the megacorporation. It’s quite ironic that he is calling out the megacorporation for corruption and the potential detriment to humanity, while he himself is actively working to replace humankind altogether. In essence, he believes that the robot civilization is the greater of the two evils, although he might not actually believe that what he is doing is evil at all. If this was a real PSA, I wonder how seriously it would be taken by the world. As more of Hwei’s robots assert their presence in the real world, the opinion of the world may just might change out of fear.
For this assignment, I designed a propaganda poster to push the agenda of my course character Hwei.
I went with louder design language, finding an image of a robot colored in bright red and oranges, and then overlaid that with text highlighted with red and pink outlines. The white text seemed like a good choice to contrast from the red and orange robot and to make it more legible.
As for the context, it is a message being sent to all of humanity to embrace the coming of AI and the robots being produced by Hwei. He believes that these robots are the future of society. Rather than assimilating the robots into human culture, Hwei believes that robots are a higher being altogether, and should replace the current reign of humans in the “biological” food chain. Although this would most likely get rid of the biological part of civilization entirely, there would be no pain, death, or suffering. Every robot would be programmed for the greater good of the earth, regardless if this new world has any room for humans or not. Accept it, don’t fear it!
As Hwei ventured on his quest for world domination through the harnessing of AI powers and creating life through his research, Aggressive Technologies was a corporation that he never saw eye to eye with.
Aggressive Technologies looked to take the AI market by storm, engulfing all of the industries pertaining to, e-commerce, social media, among other fields of tech. Their sole focus on expansion and obsession with creating a monopoly has made their corporation one that seeks to trample upon others to gain the upper hand.
On one hand, Hwei may seem to have the same overall goals as Aggressive Technologies, taking over the world and having the power to shape anything he touches. However, it has never a goal of his to gain monetarily from his research and creations. In fact, his ideal new world would consist of no monetary value on any item, idea, or being. All he ever wanted was to create the way he wanted to; for the world to see the potential beauties of the world from his perspective. The purpose of his new AI beings would not be for his gain, but rather for the betterment his world (at least for his perfect creations).
To be fair, some of Hwei’s equipment and parts of his laboratory were stolen from Aggressive Technologies, as he sent out his rogue thief programmed robots to infiltrate their headquarters. The masterminds behind Aggressive Technologies know about the research of Hwei and the existence of some of his true to life robots, but have not identified him as a serious threat yet. There will soon be a clash between the two parties, as Aggressive Technologies is threatened by Hwei’s unwillingness to back down to their expansion, while Hwei fights back against the irrational development of AI in his eyes, ruining the beauty of his craft.
For my choice of assignment this week, I decided to do the Talk to the Bot assignment. I actually did the Consult with your doctor as one of my optional assignments for a previous week, so I already had experience generating speech from Dr. Oblivion and creating a narrative. I decided to make my course character, Hwei, ask Dr. Oblivion to become one of his evil sentient robots with a body that would aid him in taking over the world by creating perfect AI beings that would take over humans.
Learning how to generate the lip synced video was a whole different process compared to the original Consult with your doctor assignment. It wasn’t hard, but it really did take a while and I think having a higher end PC and good internet speeds expedited the process for me. The process was streamlined enough to where I only had to click a few buttons and create the right folders. The tutorial given was very helpful for me to follow directions and create the videos.
What really intrigued me was the Python code used for the entire process. There was a “show code” button for each of the processes, and I looked through lines while I waited for my videos to generate. I was fascinated to see how each piece of code worked for the application. and it was definitely some good future personal project ideas for me in the future.
For the Dr. Oblivion clips generated, I was a little disappointed at how the lip sync wasn’t all that great. I’ve seen some other examples at the top of DS106 weekly assignment posts, and those look to be synced a little better than mine. There were parts where at the end of a period, the Doc’s lips kept moving and it felt a little jarring to me. For Hwei’s voice, I used a basic speech generator online to make mp3’s of his voice. I tried to use an AI voice replicator to take the original League of Legends game voice for hwei, but many of them required a paid subscription and was out of reach for me. I spliced it all together by using the Clipchamp online video editor, and it only took a few minutes to put the video, audio, and Hwei’s avatar picture together.
Overall, I had fun with this assignment and I learned a lot about AI generation for audio and video. Hopefully I can even make an AI bot myself with my own code! I’ll make sure to cater it towards taking over the world with AI, or else Hwei might hold my life against me
This is hands down my favorite ever project for DS106.
Initially I had a hard time coming up with a film to analyze. I don’t have any subscriptions to any streaming platforms, so I had to do my best to find clips on YouTube. While brainstorming, I had a lightbulb moment that reminded me of a particular scene in WALL-E that I wanted to delve further into.
I picked a scene where the majority of the attention is put on the characters. I focused in on the close-ups of the characters, and how different cinematography elements were strung together to tell a story without the use of dialogue.
I used OBS to recording my desktop screen, with the audio recording on. I wrote a script beforehand and printed it out to read, and it was recorded all in a continuous take. This allowed me to not perform any extra work of overlaying my voice on the clip, nor did I have to download the video to my computer. However, this forced me to record everything in a single take, which gave me no leeway to mess up any of my lines for 3 minutes. It took way too many takes than I want to admit to get all of my lines down, and timing my commentary with the transitions of the clips was even more difficult.
Once I did get it down though, I was so satisfied with the end result. I think this is one of my best works so far, and I had a blast walking through the creative process behind the analysis. I’d argue that the timing of the commentary is a method of storytelling in and of itself, and I think it really shines through in my WALL-E analysis.
I’ll definitely explore editing clips in a video editor in the future, but learning OBS was a great experience for the rest of my DS106 journey.
