On the Other Side
My video production class’s final assignment this year was to make a video about our personal connection with our art, be it music or otherwise. The professor suggested many ways of doing this, including using the latest AI tools to convey things not previously possible with traditional video production techniques.
Now, anyone who knows me realizes that I have been rather stridently anti-AI from jump, having seen way too many bad-faith attempts to pass off AI-generated imagery as actual photography, and while I still have many reservations (and I still don’t consider AI-generated images to be actual photography), I realized that I didn’t have to actually use AI to fabricate images out of thin air for this assignment; rather, I could use it as a tool to animate actual photographs either of me or that I had actually taken, bringing the images closer rather than further away from a more comprehensive atmosphere of the scenes I was describing in the video. I used apps like Kling and Vidu, though others probably would have worked just as well, and Suno to produce the music, to lyrics that I wrote myself. The AI artifacts are of course noticeable, though I feel that those will most likely be smoothed over in subsequent iterations of the tech.
The result is here: On the Other Side
Any readers out there who knew me during the times depicted in the video might be able to recognize the scenes displayed in some of these clips. That house was my actual house in Maitland, Florida. I really did wear that riotously colorful band uniform at Maitland Junior High School. That tan Datsun 810 was my actual first car. I did participate in the Wild Lily student protest, etc. All of them are real scenes, and though they may not have actually looked like they do in the video (which would be not just unlikely but downright uncanny), I was surprised at my visceral reaction to seeing them “come to life” as it were, many of them corresponding to my memories of how things actually went down. It felt like the AI was digging out buried memories, even though I knew that it was simply recreating them based on my prompts, which were in turn based on what I remember of those days, all the way from standing in my driveway in my scout uniform ready to go camping in the early 80’s, all the way up to walking the red carpet at the Golden Melody Awards a few weeks ago.
Am I biased because these are all personal memories that are significant to me and likely nobody else? Of course I am. It’s likely that to others, this is just a jumbled collection of incoherent scenes that don’t mean anything in particular, even though I tried my best to match the lyrics and footage to convey something greater than either. But as with any attempts at expressing oneself, I feel it’s better to keep trying, to keep making things, even if they just disappear into the algorithmic void time after time, in the slim hope that some small part of the signal can make a difference to someone out there, on the other side.
