Phantoms of the Biosphere

1 day ago

In keeping with the theme of Halloween, I decided to craft a cosmic ghost story using animation, photographs, video, and music in response to the nftshowroom X alienarthive challenge. I’m not formally entering the challenge, but it was in my thoughts as I began to sketch the narrative in my trusty comic notebook. I’m not showing my sketches ‘cause honestly they suck, but I used most of the scenes I drew, except the one in which the astronaut was supposed to be exiting from a tunnel.

My past experience creating an animation by stitching xAI Grok Imagine clips helped me think about how to storyboard more complex scenes. I took the sketches and began to recreate them in xAI Imagine, but as I was being more ambitious this time around, it wasn’t long before things got complicated with scene and character continuity across each 6-second clip, as discussed in my previous post. Additionally, the video editing software, MS Clipchamp, was unable to do some things that I wanted, so I had to work around that by mixing the timeline of events while keeping the cohesiveness of the story. I think that adjusting the flow of events in reaction to the technical limitations actually made more sense for this unusual cosmic situation that the hapless astronaut finds himself in. A light bulb went off in my head when I realized this, so I adjusted my process and the linearity of the narrative. There’s something to be said about serendipity.

MS Clipchamp environment showing media artifacts

In addition to the Imagine clips, I used new and recycled images of nature, along with a video of towering trees swaying in a soothing Pacific breeze that I captured on a recent hike. These media were captured with an Olympus camera and a Pixel phone.

I used AI music software UDIO to generate a score called Whispers of the Cosmos that is an ethereal piece with a space age theme.

As mentioned, I put it all together in MS Clipchamp. I should really get a more powerful video editing tool, but this software has a no-frills Zen simplicity that I enjoy. This time around, in spite of its limitations, the software was integral in obtaining the right sequences of scenes to then animate in Imagine, then back and forth. I was thrilled to use Clipchamp for something it wasn't designed to do.

Thank you for viewing. I hope you enjoyed the video. Happy Halloween!