'House of Cards'

A Mother With A Baby, Is Killing All The Spider's, She Is Trapped Within The Mirror, She Is Murdering Desire, A Man Without His Right Leg, Is Walking On The Water, He Is Watching All The Fighting...

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My Inspiration:

The Inspiration behind the 'House of Cards' music video was twofold, the first was looking through old images and photos of myself reading and presenting The Tarot Cards I'd designed and created at several UK health and well being exhibitions.

The second was, the first verse of a short poem/lyric I'd written several weeks beforehand during a period of Existential depression -

'A Mother With A Baby, Is Killing All The Spider's, She Is Trapped Within The Mirror, She Is Murdering Desire, A Man Without His Right Leg, Is Walking On The Water, He Is Watching All The Fighting'.

From these two inspirations, 'House of Cards' was born. As a Tarot Card reader and designer and Existential and Nihilistic Philosophical Lyricist, I wanted to combine these two personal concepts.

What it does:

'House of Cards' tells a lyrical quest story of, 'A Mother With A Baby, Is Killing All The Spider's, She Is Trapped Within The Mirror, She Is Murdering Desire, A Man Without His Right Leg, Is Walking On The Water, He Is Watching All The Fighting...'

'House of Cards' takes the courage lyrically to touch the Existential void and reality of living without hope, expectation or belief.

For example, the chorus lyrics, 'The Devil Asks, 'Why so Miserable' is not only powerful but speaks to the folly of practicing 100% positivism all day every day just to survive the reality of a terminal life.

Foundationally, it is the age old mythological quest of the fool walking themselves through the 78 cards of 'The Tarot' to a unification and individualisation of themselves as a whole 'wise' being in a split world, existence and reality.

This is especially true of Neurodivergent Artists such as myself who feel everything very deeply and see the world as it truly is without wearing the rose coloured spectacle's that others survive by wearing.

How I built it:

This involved my real world professional artistic and creative knowledge, skills and abilities in an assisted combination, collaboration and co-creative process of using several AI tools, to help me create 'House of Cards' music video for 'The Chroma Awards' Competition.

Music Creation Build Steps:

  1. Make the music which involved using my midi-keyboard to work out the basic song structure.

  2. Make a voice clone of my singing voice.

  3. Upload these to SUNO for creating my 'persona' and midi 'reference' track.

  4. Create in SUNO several variant's.

  5. Download the 'stems' of the best song.

  6. Edit, mix and produce the original finished song in Audacity and Reaper DAW's.

  7. Output as an MP3.

Video Creation Build Steps:

  1. Sketch, draw and illustrate an original storyboard concept based on the storytelling narrative of the lyrics of, 'House of Cards'.

  2. Use real world photographs of me in real life environments and situations as well as photos of me singing and other self portrait style face reference images.

  3. Upload these reference image 'datasets' and create images in Open Art AI from those original images using my 'character' created prior in Open Art AI's character tool.

  4. Chose the best 'single' static image/storyboard to lip-sync and action the song and music audio to the animation.

Lip Syncing Build Steps:

  1. Open Art AI's 'One Click' music video creation tool was used with their 'lip-syncing/singing' option to automatically sync my music and lyrics from my audio to videos.

Putting it all together:

  1. Open Art AI's 'One Click' music video creation tool was used 100% along with the 'Lip-Sync/Singing' features.

  2. Exported the finished video as a MP4 HD 19:6 Landscape AI Animated Music Video.

  3. Used Filmora Pro to add subtitles, captions, start titles, end credits and logo assets.

  4. Uploaded to Social Media for Submission to The 2025 Chroma Awards Competition.

Challenges I ran into:

  1. The biggest issues and problems that occurred happened as a direct result of the AWS outage and shutdown as two previous versions of the video had already been produced ready to be edited together for the final output and video production.

  2. However, as these two initial video creations were lost, errored or deleted along with my credits on the Open Art AI platform, I waited until my next credit cycle and made sure that the AWS outage was over to begin again.

  3. I then began two further videos, one became corrupted due to 'beta' errors in the Open Art AI's beta story/music video tools and one has become the video I've submitted for 'The Chroma Awards'.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of:

  1. I'm extremely proud of my song writing, lyrics, composition, production and musical arrangement for 'House of Cards' and feel as if the 'song' can stand on it's own without the animated music video.

  2. I'm proud that I took courage and experimented with Open Art AI's 'One Click' story tools, and, whilst it still took me personally several days to complete the project, these new AI tools and resources allowed me to stretch myself as a music video creator further than other tools so far.

*Being able to add the audio/music to the video was very useful as were the lip-sync tools.

  1. I'm pleased that I kept pushing these new tools to see what they could do and what was possible from them even in their buggy beta test stage.

  2. Keeping going even when I was not physically or mentally well, using the process as therapy and healing for my mind and body. (I have a terminal illness which is why I use AI to speed up my projects)

  3. Pulling an all-nighter at 63 years of age and still working on the project for the next several full days.

What I learned:

  1. I've learned so many new and exciting things that it's really difficult to choose one over the other, however, one of my biggest learnings is that we can take traumatic events from our lives and using the power of poetry, lyrics, music and AI generated animations, films and videos for our creative therapy, we can not only heal ourselves but inspire others to also heal themselves through the art and craft of AI.

What's next for 'House of Cards':

Since making the, 'House of Cards' music video I'm looking forward to creating new projects with both my AI digital character and my voice cloned musical persona which has now been used several times so far.

It's a long held desire of mine to use my most powerful videos and lyrical musical compositions and arrangements to turn these into a full feature animated AI film which is autobiographical in nature and content.

It would be one of my greatest creative and artistic achievement's if I could use all my best work as the foundations for this future possible long form animated AI film project.

Time will tell...

Built With

  • affinityphoto2
  • audacity
  • chatgpt
  • filmora
  • openartai
  • reaper
  • suno
  • wordpad
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