I was very lucky to be given dark blue as my colour! It is one of my favourite colours, a colour I intend to use in my art, and it is historically potent! Something you need to know about me is I love whales.
I recently watched a documentary about how intelligent specifically sperm whales are and that they have a very complex language system. The young whales would babble for the first three years of their life and then, with their mother’s guidance, start singing the same songs as their family. I thought this was awesome. And apparently, researchers are trying to create an ai (similar to chat.gpt) that will help with decoding what they are saying. by collecting thousands of hours of sounds and collating them into a format and then looking at usage rates of words between all languages. For example, every language has its version of the word mum, which is used about the same amount across all human cultures. So they intend to extrapolate these statistics to try and get close to understanding sperm whales as we can.
I love the idea of using ai, this new and technological instrument, to discover the secrets of whales and language deciphering itself. We are using this intelligence we created to try and understand the intelligence of a different species.
This is why I chose to make my video using ai.
How I did it
- Step 1: Download file locator and converter from FaceHugger (this took about 6 hours)
- Step 2: Download free code from Stable Diffusion (a visual ai system)
- Step 3: Upload both into collab, a google chrome code interface
- Step 4: Fill out all system settings. Including frame rate, ratio, camera movement
- Step 5: Trial a prompt. I did (sperm whale, in the distance, underwater, swimming towards camera, ocean
- Step 6: Wait 8 seconds for each frame to render.
First ““`frame
Last frame
- This was not how I wanted it to look. I got the aspect ratio wrong, and the imagery was weird and was all above water which is not what I wanted.
- I found out that when you put the word prompt in at the start, it slowly devolves, and because the previous frame infers the next frame it still looks cohesive. But I think this inherent entropy is weird but also beautiful.
- Step 7: rewrite the word prompt. I removed ‘ocean’ and the ‘sperm’ from sperm whale because I wanted it to be underwater. And I think the sperm bit made the whales look weird and unrecognisable. And then render it.
- Step 8: The photos looked great. I then uploaded all 500 of them to Imovie and timed them so the frame rate would work. I also matched it to the music.
What I think was successful.
- The whole piece was cohesive, and I think the music matched well with the pace.
- I love how, as the film went along, the whale imagery distorted into swaths of colours
What could be improved upon.
- I could’ve put different word prompts timed to different frames so that the images would change whilst still referencing the initial prompt. For example, the whale looks left, the whale blinks, whale spins around. This would’ve of taken hours of rendering and all the space on my hard drive, but would have looked great. I also would have lost that entropy in the last half. if there are more prompts in a shorter timeframe, there is less time for each frame to devolve