A World Like Clay

• 

  Lindric sells pottery for King Aldwulf's new-minted coins, lifting England from the Dark Age.

• 

  Bandits prowl the old Roman roads of Britain.

Inspiration

Inspired by a tabletop RPG called "Wolves of God", set in a magical version of early medieval England. I wrote a short story based on that setting, then decided to make a video of it.

What it does

This video tells a short historical fiction story.

How we built it

Done using Sora 2 and Grok Imagine, with heavy use of Shotcut and GIMP.

Challenges we ran into

Lots of consistency problems, including character models, voices, details like weapons held, unwanted motion, and the work involved in making many short clips and combining them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I was able to tell a complete narrative in a few minutes.

What we learned

I've been practicing methods of getting good performance within the limits of today's tech, like pasting character models into a scene and "healing" the inconsistency to get a useful composite image. I'm starting to master Shotcut for tweaks like changing a voice pitch and selectively muting unwanted music.

What's next for A World Like Clay

This is the final version of this story. But if the technology advances -- and I'm told there'll be a substantial Grok upgrade within days -- I'm interested in trying to adapt another short story of mine or even a novella that so far has been too challenging to animate at a tolerable quality.

Built With

• gimp
• grok
• shotcut
• sora