Hall of the Gods

Eighty-eight Ancient Gods have been fettered, sealed and forgotten by the people of Eurva. But now these Fettered Deities must be found and awakened in order to save Eurva from an encroaching evil.

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Inspiration

We are a team of two, best friends today but formerly a couple of ten years. Back then and even now we always envisioned so many stories we wanted to tell and things we wanted to create. Most of our concepts would've required major studio level capabilities and funding. So for two "regular people" from Tennessee we just were not capable of making it happen and all of our big ideas were pushed to the backburner. Fast forward many years later to the advent of generative AI. Purely for the personal challenge we decided to create a graphic novel from a personal story, using AI as the illustration method. We created image after image based on original concepts, some moving to the "use this" folder and some to the "not sure" folder. But something about a few of our unused images inspired us. We started to "see" another story to tell, another world to build. Over the course of a year we designed an entire storyline and fantasy world. We had produced a story and were ready to tell it. Hall of the Gods was to become a reality and AI was our production method of choice.

What it does

Hall of the Gods is an expansive fantasy world based upon a central storyline. Eton, our unwitting hero, resides in the world of Eurva, a land ruled by a strict and unforgiving immortal Emperor. A greedy and hunrgy evil controls this Emperor, who uses its might to control Eurva and take as much power and resources as possible. In order to consolidate power the Emperor has sealed and fettered all eighty-eight of Eurva's ancient gods, while forbidding their worship and very memory. These Fettered Ones lie locked and asleep in the Hall of the Gods. Our Hero Eton is guided to the hidden Hall of the Gods by the one Fettered God who retained some presence in the waking world. Once in the Hall Eton "unlocks" the first of the fettered Gods, the catlike Nekial, who then urges him to set forth and find ways to unlock the rest of the Ancient Ones. The Fettered Gods remain the only hope in defeating the Emperor and the unseen force that empowers his greed and might. As Eton's journey continues he meets and is aided by many yet the forces of the empire are massive and diabolical. Can Eton awaken the Fettered Gods and heal the world of the atrocity despoiling it?

How we built it

First we focused on character design for the 88 Fettered Gods since they really are the heart of the story and their awakenings drive the plotline(s). We tried many different tools to create our characters but in the end Bing Image Generator and Midjourney gave us the best results for our concepts. Many of our chosen character designs had to be further altered using Adobe and Canva. We have been working on this project for a long time and really the " only game in town" was Runway when we originally started creating the videos to bring our characters to life. However Runway honestly was not up to the challenge asssociated with our art style. Finally after months of waiting for better generators we found Kling and Hailuo. Our project REALLY took off once we had those tools. The majority of the videos used in our Hall of the Gods concept videos are now via Kling and Runway. However lately we have also started using Veo 3.1 from Google and its gens now feature prominently in our videos as well.

Challenges we ran into

One thing we discovered early in the process is that not ever AI generation tool is good for every instance. For example there are certain things HailuoAI does exceptionally well and certain things that Kling AI does very well and the two do not always overlap. We were challenged by having to find a "groove" in the creation process where we could best determine which tool would be best for which scene. Another major challenge for us was how BIG our universe is versus how fast AI tools are improving. We started creating the media for Hall of the Gods well over a year ago; our plan has always been to make a supply of videos in advance so that when we started releasing them we always had something to publish even though we were still always making more in the background. The original plan was always to release a biography video for each of the Fettered Gods then move on to episodic videos where we explored the larger storyline. But the AI tools improved so quickly that our older videos we were waiting to post now looked "below par" compared to the visuals we can now create. AI moves so fast! So we decided to alter the plan and timeline and jump into the episodic aspects of the story instead of releasing all of the biography videos first. Our extended prologue video Hall of the Gods is our first true foray into the HOTG timeline.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our excitement grows for the world and story we have created; we see so much potential in its characters, the settings, the stories and the main plot. We plan to expand into so many areas (games, shows and more). To be quite honest we are just in love with this thing we have imagined and so happy that AI is here to help us bring it to life. We are proud of our latest video-the extended prologue simply called Hall of the Gods-as well as the follow-up that we have already started creating. But as far as the effort involved in production we are really pleased with the workflows we have made. When we started making videos for our project last year, there was not much "advice" out there about longform video production via AI. The idea of taking a screenshot for use as the next "frame" in order to create visual continuity was not a widespread concept like it is now. Rather it was just something we discovered on our own as a fun little "cheat" we could use to connect our videos for longer edits. So much of our own process is now becoming the standard yet these were things we just had to figure out on our own in order to "make it work." We take pride in how we have learned so much on our own just by "doing it." No teachers, no tutorials, just two best friends and a vision. And now we have AI to help us create the things we never could.

What we learned

Honestly we have learned so much about the work process, about AI, about ourselves and about our long term goals and aspirations when it comes to Hall of the Gods. We have always had a rich and deep pool of ideas to draw from for HOTG but as we see what is possible the dreams just keep getting bigger. We want to take this as far as we can and really believe in the story and ourselves. We have learned that AI is really the third partner in our process; we've been given tools that make all of this possible. AI has leveled the playing field when it comes to storytelling. Despite the naysayers, AI will never replace traditonal forms of art. Instead it gives more oppotunity for storytelling. People who never would have had the money for an art department, actors and sets (or the connections to be financed by major studios) can now bring their untold stories to life. Truly generative AI brings a revolution to the creative process and new voices will be heard. And we have learned that WE are those people: those who in the past might have only dreamt instead of "do." Access to these AI tools is life-changing, at least for us. But beyond these larger concepts we have learned more about how we can produce an episodic narrative. For HOTG we have learned how to make use of storyboards, not just in general but for our particular process. We now know we need to consider how "long" (how many lines or words) a character's dialogue should be in regards to how much video we must generate for that particular scene before moving to the next. This type of consideration is quite different than it would be in the typical movei or TV production due to the fact we are working with 5 second generations instead of a "rolling" camera. Another thing we've learned is that we must run the same prompt in multiple tools in order to get the best version of a scene. We now call these our "takes." And just like a traditonal production crew will film the same scene multiple times and select the best versions, we do something similar. Except our "takes" can vary wildly according to our selected tools. Because what we are doing is a relatively new process, we've had to craft our own new specific vocabulary in regards to AI-specific productions. All kinds of AI-specific variables occur as we keep working on the project and often become part of the process moving forward. We plan to keep doing this for a long time so our newly-defined work habits have become crucial.

What's next for Hall of the Gods

Now that we have created our first "episodic" release we plan to continue releasing the serialized storyline in longer episodes. However our original plan to release a bio-vid of each of the Fettered Gods still remains in play, it just will not be our main focus at this point. We are in love with this story, its setting and its characters and the way we can best share it with others is by publishing more episodes that will reveal the story and main plot. We hope that others will fall in love with this dark fantasy world like we have. We aspire towards some kind of regular distribution with the goal of "getting more eyes" on Hall of the Gods (in addition to regular social media of course). Plans are in the works to introduce more of the setting and characters of Hall of the Gods, with aspirations for prequels and side stories to be released in the far future. One of our longterm goals is for Hall of the Gods to have a major streaming deal. I know we both would love seeing people talk about the epic lore of HOTG. The hope is for people to feel as strongly about Eurva as they do Westeros or Arda or the "Known Universe."We want this world and its stories to be known and loved and honestly we will keep going with it as far as we can. It's a dream for our longterm.

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