This Week’s Overview; Basing our concept this week on some of the existential questions raised with the stewardship of my pet lizard Little Brother, we asked ‘if we can care and watch over a small creature like LB, what would the same were to happen to us from a power just as incomprehensible as we are to LB?’ Using Runway to generate video clips, ElevenLabs and ChatGPT to narrate and write a script and MusicGen for a dreadful backing track, we made this;

Sketch;

Written Reflection; Over all, I have taken away a lot from this exercise. I ran out of prompting credits on my free account for some of these programs, so any addendums or changes couldn’t unfortunately be fulfilled, though at the end of the day, I don’t think a lot more was necessary. I believe our group was successful in enticing slick visuals and a tone appropriate to the initial concept. The video is a bit shoddy in terms of music, but some of these limitations are due to premium modelling and that. Regardless, I have taken away much that will influence my thinking going forward about these program’s strengths and weaknesses. Runway is extremely visual with its prompting and needs lots of descriptions, contexts and details to gauge what you want. Even then, sometimes it just farts out a still picture that I *guess* is an interpretation but it still took my credits. It’s quite finicky. To use these programs in the majority capacity of media production like I aim to, it’s still gonna be a while before I fully understand the terminology and prompting approaches to fully utilize it. Language can’t be too flowery because it doesn’t understand the metaphor but still does need some real world grounding to draw from. ChatGPT is fairly straightforward by this point, just sort of treating editing prompts as you would a student, pointing them in the right direction and using examples. Another development I have come to discern, I have a growing intuition to explore short-form narrative content as a possible direction for both my Final Piece this semester, as well as future sketches, based on the outcome of this sketch. I have found this process of narrative prompting as both interesting and exciting to see what these programs can lead me. While this sketch was initially a narrative concept, it’s fairly thin by all means and doesn’t contain conventional narrative structure, which I would aim to replicate going forward. While I’m fairly happy with the final product, I’m more jovial toward the well of experience and knowledge about prompting video, material collation and cross-generator collaboration.