The Worst Year to Be Alive

Inspiration

In 536 AD, the sun went dark. This is recorded in numerous sources from China to Ireland.

As a student of the early Middle Ages / Late Migration Period, I have long been fascinated by this event. What was it like to live during this cataclysm?

I drew on the films that awed and disturbed me as a child, mainly Kurosawa's Dreams.

Tools

Mostly exciting was the opportunity to reconstruct the Proto-Norse, Byzantine-Greek and Middle Chinese languages. This was done using Perplexity to generate a phonetic reconstruct of the language, and then feeding that into ElevenLabs with a Norwegian, Greek, and Chinese speaker, respectively. I was extremely impressed with ElevenLabs v3. It delivered a performance that was serious, befitting a chronicle, but with pathos.

Is it an accurate reconstruction of those languages? If you're from the 6th century, hit me up.

Other tools used: Midjourney, Kling AI, OpenArt, Freepik, Photoshop, Nano Banana, Da Vinci Resolve, ElevenLabs and Epidemic Sound.