Crafter's Heart

• 

  Sonia, former human, manages the restaurant and VR parlor where hero Stan works.

• 

  The virtual world of the game Thousand Tales hosts AIs and once-human minds, often in bodies like this griffin.

• 

  A brain-uploaded human operates a real-world griffin robot for purposes friendly, and other.

• 

  Stan helps run a drone race with heiress Molly one night. An AI from the game world participates, too.

• 

  Ocean colony Castor, offshore of the Free State of Cuba, 2039.

• 

  Stan works with a troubled young employee named Dale, who adores their AI boss.

Inspiration

I wrote a science fiction novel called "Crafter's Heart", which you can find on Amazon. It's the direct sequel to novel "Crafter's Passion", and it's part of a much larger setting called "Thousand Tales". I wanted to adapt the book to video format to bring it to life in a whole new medium, while learning AI tools.

What it does

It's a 32 minute animated show featuring numerous characters and locations, portraying a floating sea colony near Cuba, and a virtual game world, to tell a complex story.

How we built it

The video makes heavy use of Sora 2 and Grok Imagine, with Shotcut for video editing along with tools GIMP and Audacity. Notepad++ was my main tool for writing prompts. I used freeware music by Darren Curtis too, and one little sound effect from JSFXR.

Challenges we ran into

Pushing the limits of today's video technology showed me what those limits are. Getting a character to use a consistent appearance, or having a consistent set, or keeping the same character voice, was very difficult. Near the end, Sora made its watermarks more intrusive, which pushed me to mangle a brief scene's camerawork to hide those. There were also challenges for me coming to this medium with very little video experience. I needed to learn how to adapt my book-writing to use segments that the AI could portray at all, occasionally running into censor filters -- "Yes, I want the character to jump off the bridge. No, this isn't what your rules ban; he's going to be fine in the next scene." There were a few places where I had to rethink the story to get around the technical or censor limits. I also ended up heavily altering the story, leaving out quite a bit of it to fit into a reasonable length, then doing editing on the complete product and seeing how much could be trimmed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is a quite long and complex video. In contrast to videos where there's little continuity or heavy reliance on a single character seeing non-recurring environments, I was able to show a few repeated sets and characters and considerable dialog.

What we learned

I developed some tricks for handling the continuity problem, such as copy-pasting reference images and having an AI merge them into a usable starting frame. I learned more about video editing, and about how to pare a written story down to a reasonable length that can be sliced into relatively simple, short clips.

What's next for Crafter's Heart

I want to write more stories in this setting, in addition to the 12+ existing books. (See "Thousand Tales: Extra Lives" for a free one!) Besides that, I would love to do a video adaption of a different story, my fantasy series "Wavebound". So far I'm not satisfied with the technology I would need for it, but I've done a few little experiments to try the concept out. I may also produce a short story adaptation about an AI drone pilot who's mentioned offhand in this story.

Built With

• audacity
• gimp
• grok
• shotcut
• sora