Not much to summarize in this week other than my video project. I will say that I had a foot injury earlier today from playing tennis, so I had to go get it checked out and I got home pretty late. Luckily, I still had time to put something together to wrap up week 12.
And as usual, here are my daily creates for week 12. On to the final project. Almost done with the semester!
Here are my Daily Creates for Week 12!
The first one is a trading card I made for Remy the Rat. I’m not sure when I started using Remy as my avatar for “anonymous” things online, but it has been my go to for a while, and it was fitting to make a card based on him.
The second one was to animate something that shouldn’t move. This is a moving / waving banana. Pretty self explanatory but I wish I could make GIFs of this quality on my own.
The last one was to make an eclipse poem. I highlighted a few words to stand out to create a piece on the emotions of the eclipse. A lot of descriptive adjectives to bring out the expressiveness of this poem.
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 this week’s assignment, I was stressed thinking about how to do this video project. I was kinda procrastinating since last week on doing it but, I was able to come up with an idea to do my video project. I wanted to create a scenario that it was a piece of “lost film” that people stumbled upon. As well as broadcasting it nationwide for people to “wake up” and that Artificial intelligence is going to take over. I wanted to create this using the Wav2lip video since I was not able to make it work for the last assignment we got and I used Viemo. Sarah Bradshaw a member of my group from our radio show was able to help me out she sent instructions in our group chat since other members were also struggling and it was a blessing getting help from her. I was able to make the Wav2lip work!!!
For this video project, I was able to use Wav2lip to add the audio of my AI character making a Public Service Announcement in 60-70s video graphics. The video is supposed to be a PSA televising that we found an old film that could change how the human race is going to think about Artificial intelligence. At first, I was having trouble on how to upload the video through my files but Sarah’s instructions that she posted helped me a lot!! I’m glad that I was able to use that application because I’ve been wanting to create a video with it since we were first assigned to use it.