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Thanks for breaking this down for us!

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Jan 30Liked by Mike Gioia

This is a good break-down! Now, consider the use of AI for the sound aspect of film making. Would be a great companion to this article 👍

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This is an excellent breakdown. I learned a lot.

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author

Thanks JB. It is, of course, just my two cents. My hope is it serves as a helpful taxonomy to help people form their own categories in their heads.

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Love this. I'm calling it AIography.

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I've been dreaming of a "digital equivalence" model of reality for longer than all the AI hype has been around; partly informed by Jean Baudrillard's "Precession of Simulacra", and largely because I was sick of the tedium required to elicit still underwhelming physically analogous detail when rendering animations in blender, and the cost-prohibition of actually doing something. NeRF comes close.

This whole thing might converge when generative point-clouds are common place and it should come back to a sort of OS-level integration and the thesis I shared with you. Physics and game engines will also likely have progressed more to incorporate text-to-product workflows.

Really, we have the machine Nikola Tesla theorized would be used for teaching—a device hooked onto the imagination of a teacher, projecting images onto a screen for students to see. This makes me think of reverse-engineering meaning from dreams, which might be another good application for back-propagating through text-to-image algorithms in conjunction with whatever the work from Japanese scientists who allegedly created a dream reading technology has become.

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I'm not sure what category this belongs in, but here's what I'm doing. It seems a pretty accessible methodology (or I wouldn't be doing it).

1) I create characters in Dalle.

2) I grab the sound from some text to speech AI, my current favorite being Pi, though the ElevenLabs GPT is also useful. I've used Murf in the past.

3) I then animate the faces and lip sync to sound in an old Mac software, CrazyTalk. While this software has been discontinued, I believe the same tech lives on in another software, Cartoon Animator from Reallusion.

4) Then I bring all these parts in to an old version of Hitfilm, a standard video editor. I LOVE my old version of Hitfilm, but the company that makes it has been sold, and I don't know the current status.

The latest example of a finished video can be seen here:

https://hippytoons.com/p/whats-really-happening-at-substack

So this method is perhaps best described as a hybrid, content is AI generated, but then manipulated by old fashioned video editing. I haven't seen any AI video that interests me yet.

What would REALLY help me are more tools for animating the 2d characters I get out of Dalle. I can animate the faces adequately now, but animating body parts like hands, legs and arms etc seems beyond reach. Well, almost. I can do this in Hitfilm to a degree, and I've seen other methods that attempt body animations of 2d characters, but so far none of these methods seem too impressive.

Cartoon Animator apparently does a good job of animating cartoon illustration characters, but they don't interest me so much.

Any tips, suggestions or links regarding characters created in Dalle will be most appreciated.

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You don't think the fully synthetic will stabilize master Gioia? New release from google et all seem to be indicating this will be a shortlived problem

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I believe the technology will improve to get there Commodore Leese, but when everyone has the same god-level moviemaking model, results without a ton of personalized inputs will level out to a common quality that will become boring. The interesting element the equation will have to come in the form of human inputs. That's where you'll see truly differentiated, *directed* results. I have a feeling this won't be text inputs, but who knows.

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Fantastic!

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I would add 3D animation to the list. This is also popular with beginners though most efforts are essentially just animated stills (using Pixar-style images generated in MJ). Mickmumpitz is one example of someone doing much more complex stuff with Blender and a bunch of AI tools. Work flow is not easy but probably doable for most. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHbY-6Vy53g&t=181s

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