I’ve been diverted from my usual posts while working on The Cauldron, a set of visualisations for a proposed TV series.
Owen is recalled from his gap year when his grandmother dies. In a vision she tells him his destiny is to take over her powerful coven. Although reluctant to comply he returns to his home town of Nant Cerid where he takes up a place at the local University. With his friends he’s soon drawn into an occult battle to find the legendary Cauldron of Ceridwen. Styling themselves as “The Crows” his crew must defeat their rivals “The Magpies” to achieve their goals and stop the town descending into chaos.
This project has been around for some years. It originally had a producer attached and we even had costume designs made and created. Unfortunately it never went any further. It recently occurred to me that with the advances in AI it would be perfectly possible to create visualisations of some of the scenes and that is what I’ve been spending my time on recently. You can find all the assets I’ve created at cauldronofchanges.co.uk whilst this blog will revert to its more usual contents.
It’s worth reflecting on my experiences with Openart AI which I have used extensively to create scenes. Openart AI does a pretty good job of rendering scenes but struggles with some things:
1 It has a tendency to duplicate characters for no apparent reason. You can see this in a couple of sequences.
2 It struggles to render comprehensible text. Weirdly it manages to render Defender as Difender even though I’d specified the right spelling. Also weirdly it renders perfect shots of the latest Land Rover Defender other than the name on the bonnet. As the series is set in Wales there should be dual language signs in places but generating Welsh text is too much of a stretch.
3 There’s a tendency to Americanise scenes. The last scene at the bus station looks influenced by Hopper’s Nighthawks but hardly right for a Welsh bus station.
4 Some of the problems can be ironed out with more generations and clearer prompts but I’ve decided to go for the general look and feel rather than perfection.
5 What these visualisations cannot do is to entirely convey the contents of the script. I’ve had to simplify and omit certain scenes to produce the current outline. The dialogue in the script is important in setting the tone of the piece but I have only been able to include snippets in the scenes presented.
