Cosmic Creations- An Animated Haiku

over 1 year ago (Edited)

This is my entry to the the latest Cosmic Creations, which tackles the issue of adding a human touch to AI art. I wasn’t sure how to go about tackling this challenge but eventually came up with an idea that was quickly derailed when the stars of the show went missing. I was bummed out because I was really psyched up to challenge Stanley Kubrick with a cinematic masterpiece. So what next? To paraphrase Ned Flander’s Beatnik parents, “I’ve tried nothing, and I’m all out of ideas.” So I decided to bring out the heavy artillery.

I started from scratch by brainstorming some ideas using pencil and paper. No images, just words to get all ideas out of my head.

Trade Secrets

I then proceeded to doodle images only without worrying about aesthetics. Just quickly jotted down any moving image that was salient in mind as I reviewed the AI art I had generated these past few months. I knew I wanted to create an animation but not exactly what kind of animation. I sketched across several pages trying to capture the flow of movement, taking into account what I knew about the software. It had been a while since I touched Krita, so I was rusty. One of the doodles was based on an image that I had posted on Twitter with some silly comment in Spanish. I liked the sensual elegance of the woman, and the simplicity of the scene (the fact she was naked was an added bonus). The image elicited sultry visions in my mind. I could see the sky glittering, and the words of a poem fading in and out on the window.

Mad scribblings of initial concept

Once I latched on to this idea, I moved on to another larger notebook that I use to quickly prototype animations and other types of creative pursuits. It helps me keep track of the specific details of a project along with notes on anything I learned along the way. So, it is also a permanent record of processes and techniques.

Temporary and permanent notes

Star-maker

You can now find plenty of software/plugins that will allow you to create all sorts of special effects such as a glittering star-field effect. There are also many ways to streamline one’s work and do things that would’ve taken someone using pencil and paper a long time to accomplish. Nevertheless, I quickly realized that if I wanted a star-field effect, I would have to design and develop each individual star. So, I had to keep it simple, and without further ado, I rolled up my sleeves and began with the first star.

As I labored making each fiery orb, I wished AI development would hurry up, so I can just write a prompt and get a star field up in a matter of seconds. As you can see it took many layers (and many false starts) to get the effect. Each star is uniquely hand crafted and made in Canada!

Each blue rectangle denotes a key frame at 12 frames per second

This level of control allowed me to more precisely fine-tune the animation, and lay out its elements throughout the scene. Once I was satisfied, I proceeded to the next step.

Haiku text

I wanted the poem to fade in and out but had no idea how to accomplish this. I had not written the poem yet either, but the epic poem I had in my head quickly turned into a haiku. In the first iteration, the text was supposed to appear on the window, but it seemed so boxed in that I decided to think outside the box and move the text off to the side for a more avant-garde look, ooh la la.

The text was fiendishly complex to work with and I spent a tedious amount of time time trying to get it right. I was having trouble with the fading trick. By chance, I came across someone who mentioned a Krita feature that allowed one to alter the behavior of entire layers over time. I was working with vector layers, so I wasn’t sure if the technique would work, but after applying it, the fade-in and fade-out effects worked! It would’ve taken me forever to do it manually by hand, but thanks to Krita, the task was quickly finished and more elegantly implemented.

Each red dot represents a keyframe that allows the user to change opacity independent of other keyframes and useful for fade in and out effects

Did I manage to add a human touch? I hope so 'cause that was a lot of stars. I have to admit there’s still a part of me that thinks using a computer for art smacks of funny business, AI or not. There is no way I could have achieved this level of animation using the traditional tools used by Walt Disney et al., and I'm a newbie with Krita. I was elated each time I found a hack that saved me some work, followed by pangs of guilt for taking the easy computational route. Regardless, I enjoyed it very much, and I hope you did too!