'The Man In The Moon'

Tobacco smoking spiders are crawling in my garden they are looking for my Maidens they are seeking out my fire, a serpent singing Snakeman, is caught within the spider's webs a Mermaid out of water...

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My Inspiration:

The Inspiration behind 'The Man In The Moon' music video was twofold, the first was watching the film, Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902 - 'A Trip to The Moon') - Georges Méliès on YouTube, one of the first stop frame animations created and the second was, the first verse of a short poem/lyric I'd written several weeks beforehand - 'Tobacco smoking spiders, are crawling in my garden, They are looking for my Maidens, they are seeking out my fire'. From these two inspirations, 'The Man In The Moon' was born.

As an Animator and Lyricist, I wanted to combine these two concepts.

What it does:

'The Man In The Moon' tells a lyrical quest story of the 'Tobacco Smoking Spider's, Maiden's, Mermaids out of water and the Existential reality of living'. For example, the chorus lyrics, 'The Joker Says, 'Why so serious'' is not only powerful but speaks to the folly of 100% positivism all day every day just to survive the reality of life.

'The Man In The Moon' attempts to satirise and make absurd the idea that we exist for a reason rather than the simple evolutionary biological reality and facts of being parasitic.

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 'The Man In The Moon' 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, 'The Man In The Moon'.

  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. Whilst this tool is still in its initial beta test stage, lots of issues and problems exist in fine tuning and lining up exactly the 'subtitles/captions' with the audio.

  2. However, I wanted to experiment with this particular tool to see if it would save me time, which, sadly it didn't and actually caused a slow down as their were lots of errors and comprehension mistakes that caused an enormous amount of extra subtitle editing work. I've chosen to leave them as to edit this again in Filmora will take more time.

Putting it all together:

  1. Open Art AI's 'One Click' music video creation tool was used 100% along with the 'Captions/Subtitles' and '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 titles and 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 three 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 three 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. 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 'The Man In The Moon' 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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)

  5. 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 even after several failed, botched and broken attempts at making this music video creation for 'The Chroma Awards', even after all the loss and bereavement of seeing several days work disappear into the ether, even then, something was still possible to rebirth from the ashes and to give it a shove to rise like a Phoenix. I completed the project and that matters!

What's next for 'The Man In The Moon':

Since making, 'The Man In The Moon' music video I'm looking forward to creating new projects with both my AI digital character and my 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 an 'Opera' or 'Musical' animated AI film. It would be one of my greatest achievement's if I could use all my best work as the foundations for this future possible project. Time will tell.

Built With

  • audacity
  • chatgpt
  • clipchamp
  • filmoro
  • openartai
  • reaper
  • suno
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