James Cunliffe

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New Skool Community

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The Hidden Archive: Free Creative Tools, Resources and a New Teleprompter App Over the past few years, I’ve created a slightly ridiculous number of things. Books. Apps. Courses. Music. Videos. Experiments. Resources. Some useful, some strange, and quite a few that sit somewhere in between. One of the things I’ve wanted to do for a while is create a single place where I can bring more of this work together and make it accessible to people who might find it useful. That place is The Hidden Archive Skool community. The idea is to build a growing library of creative tools, resources, courses and experiments for people interested in creativity, technology, storytelling and the changing world of creative work. And there’s already quite a bit inside. Introducing Archive Prompter The newest addition to the Archive is Archive Prompter, a teleprompter app I’ve been developing to solve some of the frustrations I’ve had when recording videos. As someone who spends a lot of time talking to cameras, recording presentations and trying to remember what I was supposed to say next, I wanted something simple, clean and genuinely useful. Archive Prompter has grown from that idea into its own little application, with different ways of displaying and controlling scripts depending on how you like to work. Rather than keeping it tucked away as another personal project, I’ve decided to make Archive Prompter available through The Hidden Archive’s free tier. But it isn’t the only thing available for free. Rob Like a Robot | Free eBook I’ve also added my book Rob Like a Robot to the Archive as a free download. The book explores creativity, automation and the strange relationship between humans and machines — particularly the idea that as technology becomes increasingly capable of doing repetitive work for us, perhaps the goal shouldn’t be to compete with machines by becoming more machine-like ourselves. Instead, we should be asking what technology can free us to do. It was written during an earlier chapter of my own exploration into creativity and technology, but many of the ideas feel even more relevant now as AI rapidly changes the creative landscape. Creative Archetypes You’ll also find the Creative Archetypes app available on the free tier. This was an experiment inspired by the idea that we all approach creativity differently. Some of us explore. Some build. Some challenge. Some nurture. Some obsess over understanding how everything works. Creative Archetypes is designed as a playful way of exploring those different creative instincts and perhaps understanding a little more about how you personally approach the creative process. Between Archive Prompter, Rob Like a Robot and Creative Archetypes, I wanted the free side of the community to contain things that are genuinely useful in their own right. You don’t need to subscribe to a paid tier just to find something worthwhile. Going Deeper Into the Archive For those who want to explore further, there is also a premium tier that opens up more of the work I’ve created over the years. Premium members get access to additional resources connected to Field Notes, my series of pocket investigations exploring ideas around culture, psychology, technology and the stranger corners of human experience. That includes access to the presentation slides I’ve created for the series, allowing you to dig into the research and ideas behind the videos in more detail. There’s also access to some of my older music and albums, projects from different periods of my creative life that haven’t always had an obvious home online. And for people interested in learning the practical side of creative production, premium members can access my 2D Character Animation course. The course explores my process for building and animating 2D characters, taking you through the workflow behind creating characters and bringing them to life through tools such as Photoshop and After Effects. You can also take the first module for free:   Building a Creative Library Ultimately, The Hidden Archive isn’t really intended to be a single course or product. I see it more as a library that can continue growing alongside the things I’m already doing. When I build a useful tool, it can go into the Archive. When I create a course, I can add it to the library. When a Field Notes investigation produces interesting research or resources, I can share them there. And when I inevitably disappear down another creative rabbit hole and emerge several weeks later with some strange new experiment, there’s now somewhere for that to live too. I’m also increasingly interested in exploring accessible creative technology, particularly free and open-source tools that can help people create without needing expensive subscriptions or enormous budgets. So over time, I hope The Hidden Archive becomes a useful collection of tools, ideas and knowledge for anyone trying to make things, learn new skills or simply explore where creativity and technology might be heading next. There’s plenty more planned. But for now, the doors to The Hidden Archive are open. You can join the community for free, download Archive Prompter, read Rob Like a Robot, explore Creative Archetypes, and have a look around. Join The Hidden Archive: https://www.skool.com/the-hidden-archive-4393

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The Hidden Archive

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What is The Hidden Archive? The YouTube channel finally got a rebrand. I realised two years ago that my YouTube page was starting to feel uncurated. The simple truth was that being multidisciplinary, and wanting to explore a wide variety of mediums, had led to a kind of anti-niching. In my own way, I was navigating the principle of correspondence. In creative abstraction terms, that essentially means gaining an understanding of multiple fields and then connecting the dots between them to deepen my understanding of creativity as a whole. That said, I realised that on the surface, this focus was beginning to look unclear. So I split the channel into three: one for music, one for creative tutorials, and one for the exploration of myth, technology, storytelling and ideas. And I really got drawn into this new direction. Since the switch-up, I’ve created two series. The first is The Hidden Archive, a documentary-style video essay series covering a wide range of topics; from UFOs and the Gnostic creation story to the hidden psychological patterns that repeat across human history.   I also have Field Notes, which is a more raw, presentation-led educational format that I record from my desk rather than the studio. These are pocket investigations into subject matters that keep me curious about the world.   I briefly want to talk about the creative direction behind the rebrand. The logo itself is heavily inspired by occult symbolism. The further I dig into the subject of psychology, the more occult themes tend to emerge. I find that a lot of old occult symbols lack readability, though, so I wanted to make The Hidden Archive logo feel less complex. There’s a dual meaning to the logo design. Carl Jung’s Red Book has had a huge influence on my life, and there’s a vision he has about a well at the top of a mountain. From this well flows water, which acts as a metaphor for wisdom. That knowledge travels down from the peak to all those who seek it. There’s a small circle at the top of the peak in the logo. The lines travelling down around the silhouette of the person signify that movement of information. The silhouette receives the wisdom at the centre and sits within the target of an outside force. The message is really this: if you watch this channel, you will be targeted with new ideas. The split silhouette represents balance. The teal colour represents the water from above, while the contrasting gold suggests that the ideas explored on the channel hold real-world value. To people outside of the creative industry, the logo might just look like random lines and circles, or maybe an alien getting abducted. But it has been crafted with intention. And if you’re a curious mind, now you know what it represents. I plan on running The Hidden Archive channel in the background as an outlet for expression, but also as a place where I can provide value to those who want to gain a better understanding of the world we exist within, and how we can get the most out of it.

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What Are UFOs?

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What Are UFOs and What Do They Say About Humanity? Back in 2024, I went down the rabbit hole of UFOs/ UAPs. It was around the time David Grusch hit the scene and it really did seem like we were going to get disclosure any day. There was an energy around the topic, it felt charged, so much so that I found I could rarely think of much else. I read American Cosmic by Diana Pasulka, picked up Elizondo’s Imminent, watched all the congressional hearings on the topic, and got hooked on AJ’s The Why Files. The whole topic was a special interest of mine right until January 2025, when News Nation released a video with US Air Force veteran Jake Barber, of a UAP crash retrieval of a giant egg. The evidence… A video that looks like someone poking a normal sized egg with a stick in low resolution… And honestly, that video switched me off from the subject all together until I started to see patterns re-emerging once more. More recently I spent 6 months working on a series called ‘The Red Book’ which investigated Carl Jung’s Libre Novus, bringing his visions to life, and using the stories and lessons as a lens to view the modern world. Eventually I discovered that Jung had wrote about UFOs in 1958. Carl noticed that UFOs seem to emerge in times of a meaning crisis, which would ultimately become the thesis of the investigative video I made on the topic. I wanted to lay out a timeline of UFO encounters across history, from the alien cave paintings in Western Australia, which are potentially 4000-17000 years old, to the more modern sightings and stories around the Nimitz Tic Tac video. And it all gets a little bit strange to say the least. I feel like I’ve done a good job of condensing the heart of the topic into 35 minutes, exploring UFOs from a multitude of angles, using visuals to help others better understand the recurring patterns that emerge. But where do I draw my own conclusions on the subject matter? I have never seen a UFO, although I have had strange synchronicities in my life that have made it near impossible to remain nihilistic. My gut feeling is that when we feel unsatisfied with reality, there’s something within us that draws us to the sky and hopes that there is something beyond our current understanding of reality. I also think from a philosophical point of view, that we shouldn’t sit back and hope that saviors will emerge from the sky. Instead, we should find ways of living that have the potential to align the world and put it on a brighter path. While I think there probably is more to reality than we can fully comprehend, we should remain humble to the fact that we don’t have those answers and we should be skeptical of those who say they do without substantial evidence to back it up.

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The Gnostic Creation Story

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Why This Story Is Valuable While researching the Red Book series, I’d occasionally read comments linking Jung’s work to Gnosticism. I was raised by Christians, and although I’m agnostic myself (if I had to put a label on it), I’m still interested in the history of religion and more recently whether the stories hold any value in the modern world. I eventually made my way to an Alex O’Connor video with Bart Erhman where they outlined the core aspects of the Gnostic Creation Story, from the Apocryphon of John. Which then led me to a translation of those texts here: http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/apocjn-davies.html It’s a wild take on the ‘true’ nature of Christianity. That turns a lot about that tradition on its head. If you want to know how, I recommend you watch the video. I think like any story it can be interpreted in a multitude of ways. If you’re like me, with a slight technological bias, you might draw parallels with simulation theory, I enjoy finding relevant symbolism in these kinds of stories, but above all else the gnostic world view felt like an appropriate lens to view the current state of geopolitics and global affairs. The story itself is about a narcissistic and jealous ruler who projects a false narrative to his subordinates with the intention of control and manipulation. It’s a theme that we’re all too familiar with and I think that’s why the story resonates with so many people. Because there’s this glimmer of hope that each and every one of us has the capacity to break away from a broken system, that we have the potential to see through the lies and do something about it, and that’s a powerful archetypical idea. I think a lot of people in society feel helpless as the bigger players make moves that we can’t fully comprehend, yet whose actions cause significant harm to ourselves and those around us. The messaging in this story, at least to me, reminds me of the butterfly effect, where a single flap of a butterfly’s wings can cause a sequence of events that changes the nature of reality for everyone. I think we need more butterflies aligning and flapping in a better direction, and if nothing else I’d like this video to imbue a sense of hope in those who watch it. To help them understand that they can make an impact, and that there’s still a reason to try and do the right thing, even in a world that doesn’t seem to reward it.

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New Red Book Series

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What this series is about? Carl Jung’s The Red Book was released to the public in October 2009, almost a century after he began working on it between 1913 and 1921. Jung had collaborated closely with Sigmund Freud until their split in 1913, after which Jung entered a period of intense inner exploration. Around that time, Jung recorded vivid visions: flooding across Europe, mass death, a continent “washed” in blood. A year later, Europe entered the First World War. Whether those visions were prophecy, pattern-recognition, anxiety, or something more symbolic, Jung treated them as meaningful, and followed them inward, deliberately, to map the forces shaping his psyche: persona, shadow, desire, fear, and (in his own language) soul. This series is an attempt to take that work seriously. Not to sensationalise it, but to ask a practical question: what can The Red Book teach us about meaning, fear, and the stories we tell ourselves when the world feels unstable? Why I’m making this? A couple of months ago I woke up in the middle of the night with a rare kind of clarity, the “quiet certainty” you don’t get often. The idea arrived fully formed: make a series exploring The Red Book, and use it as a craft challenge, as well as a research project, writing, presenting, storytelling, editing, with something useful on the other side. Part of the urgency is due to the times we’re living through. When conflict in Europe escalates, it’s hard not to notice how quickly stability can feel conditional. I’m not trying to predict the future, but I do think introspection matters more in anxious times, as the fear can permiate into our culture. It becomes politics. It becomes behaviour. Jung’s work is one of the most direct attempts I know of to meet that fear internally rather than outsource it. And at a more personal level: I don’t want to drift through the next decade passively consuming commentary. I’d rather build something, and build it with intent. Why the production approach is mixed-media (and includes AI)? One practical problem: The Red Book is full of imagery that’s intensely visual, symbolic, and often surreal. To do it justice traditionally would require huge time, specialist craft, or a very large budget. At the same time, the themes feel timely, so waiting “until I can afford it” doesn’t make much sense. That’s where the modern tools become useful. Used carefully, they allow an independent creator to visualise material that would otherwise be inaccessible, as long as you treat the output as raw material, not a finished style. My approach is mixed-media: building a coherent visual language, then using AI-generated elements as components that I art-direct, edit, and integrate through a more traditional post pipeline. On the research side, I’ve used tools like Perplexity and NotebookLM to sanity-check interpretations and cross-reference details in the manuscript, not as an authority, but as a faster way to catch mistakes and surface alternative readings. Visually, I’ve taken cues from Jung’s own illustrations, a blend of illuminated-manuscript detail, abstraction, and private symbolism, then used that as a style constraint. From there: generation, selection, compositing, paintover, layout and motion, with Photoshop and After Effects doing the heavy lifting. The goal isn’t “AI aesthetic”. The goal is authored coherence. Why use AI for parts of this at all? Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious describes shared psychological patterns, archetypes, instincts, repeating motifs across culture. There’s a quiet symmetry in using machine learning systems trained on large-scale cultural material to help visualise a project rooted in shared human symbolism. Not because the machine “understands” the symbols, but because it can help surface forms and textures that feel dream-adjacent, which suits The Red Book. More importantly, this is about creative agency. I understand why people are uneasy about AI, the ethics, the economics, the speed of change. I’ve had the same discomfort. But blanket dismissal doesn’t protect your creativity; it often just delays your ability to navigate reality. Used responsibly, these tools can help tell stories where footage doesn’t exist, where locations are impossible, or where the budget simply isn’t there. Big creators are already doing that, and so are the companies many of us work with. My view is simple: learn how it works, decide where you draw your line, and stay in control of your process. This series is partly an argument, in practice: storytelling is becoming more accessible, and creators shouldn’t surrender their voice out of fear. You don’t have to love the tools, but you do need to understand them.

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Updated Motion Reel

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After a year at GMGN delivering typography-led motion and design for a range of Web3 clients, I’m back in freelance, and back in the gaming space. The last three months have been full-on: producing, editing and animating across multiple deliverables, with a heavier focus on social-first formats and fast turnaround. This has been overdue, but I’ve also taken the opportunity to refresh the site, starting with an updated motion reel:   What’s New? Before GMGN, typography wasn’t a core part of my toolkit. I came up through video production, where the work is often driven by footage, pacing and story. GMGN’s output was different: message-first, text-heavy, and designed to land in-feed. That year forced a step-change in how I think about hierarchy, clarity and brand voice. Over the course of the year I built and shipped hundreds of pieces, embedded into a Figma-led workflow, and left with a stronger, more flexible design palette that now carries into everything I do, especially when a project needs content systems rather than one-off edits. If you’re curious, the case study is here. Tool-wise I’m still primarily in the Adobe ecosystem (Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects), with Resolve when a project calls for it, and selective use of AI-assisted tools where they genuinely speed up ideation, visual development or cleanup. Blender and Unreal are still on my roadmap, I’m just being intentional about where I invest learning time while client work is busy. Is That Rotoscoping? A lot of the recent gaming work leans on rotoscoping, cutting subjects frame-by-frame so you can place type, UI and graphic elements behind the action without losing readability. It’s one of those techniques that looks simple when it’s done well, but it’s very easy to get wrong: edge quality, motion continuity, hierarchy and composition all matter. The good news is that modern tools can handle a large chunk of the grunt work, but getting it to a professional finish still needs a careful eye and a clean process, especially when you’re trying to create something that feels distinctive, not templated. It’s been a genuinely fun area to lean into again. Availability? At the moment I’m on a rolling retainer with a tech and gaming-focused marketing agency, and I’m rebuilding my freelance network after the year at GMGN. I’m also balancing a couple of personal projects alongside client work, so I’m selective, but I’m always open to the right conversation, especially where the brief needs strong delivery, clear creative direction, and post-production leadership.  

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How I Built This ‘About Me’ Video

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I recently re-subscribed to Midjourney, to test out some of its new video functionality and I discovered a little VFX/ Post-Production hack that really helps out when isolating images. But first, if you haven’t already seen it, the video is below (there’s no sound as it sits on the Website’s homepage).   Why Make This Video? There’s a big project I’m working on behind the scenes which is going to require the blending of traditional design/ motion graphics/ filmmaking techniques but mixed with modern AI tools. There’ll be more about that in a later post but while I’m paying £50 a month to Midjourney, I wanted to familiarise myself with the tool. So thus began the challenge of rehashing what I’ve been up to over the last half decade in a visual format that would sit well on my website. The limitations I set was to keep the text in 2 containers around a central video component, make the copy rhyme throughout and keep the imagery relevant to the copy while complying with the blue and purple colour scheme of the site. Is it all A.I? No, I wanted to have full control of the copy for this, I often use tools like ChatGPT to bounce ideas off or to troubleshoot but as this piece was about me, I wanted the written part to be as close to unedited as possible. There was a challenge in getting certain lines to fit within the containers, so a lot of sections did change.  There’s a hybrid of Midjourney and Photoshop throughout this one, for example the director’s clapperboard was without text, which was later added in Photoshop. The 3D camera is a gen that required heavy editing in Photoshop (Midjourney tends to generate images with blemishes that need fixing before you can run it through their video gen). The laptop, phone and book are all pulled from previous work I’ve done and are modified After Effects templates. Finally, everything has been colour graded to fit the brand guidelines of the website. It’s Not Possible Without Keylight Here’s the secret sauce to making a video like this, first of all you’re going to need to prompt your images ‘floating’ in front of a flat green background. You’d end up with something like this:               It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to tweak, the following step is to take it into a tool like Photoshop and remove the background, then add a chroma green backdrop afterwards. You would then add this back into Midjourney as the reference image before prompting the video component to spin on its axis extremely slowly. If you’re lucky you’ll get something like this:   And once you have that, you can take it into After Effects and run an effect called ‘Key Light’ to take away the green, allowing you to place it over any new background you like.   What Are The Limitations? You’ll still have to generate multiple iterations to find a clip that you like. You have to be incredibly specific with your prompts or the A.I is going to run off and create a lot of weird visual artifacts. You have to be eagle eyed when looking for mistakes and even with ‘good’ generations, they’re still not perfect. A.I should still be treated like a tool and is worth exploring, but the important factor is blending it with the other creative skills you’re developing. I wouldn’t have been able to create this video without having experience with motion design, typography, Photoshop and After Effects. As these creative tools become more accessible, those with a solid background and understanding of the theory will still have an edge.

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Is Gen AI Bad For The Environment

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Generative AI is a divisive topic depending on who you speak with. One recent critique I heard was that it’s extremely bad for the environment, but no evidence has ever been presented with this statement. That made me slightly sceptical of that specific talking point so I decided to ask the AI to defend itself. This was my first time using ChatGPT’s deep research and I’ve got to say, I was mighty impressed, it spent a good 12 minutes, checking through 23 sources and refining the information with the queries I’d set and ultimately this is what came back: Electricity Use: AI Image Generation vs. Everyday Activities   Introduction Generating an image with an AI model (like ChatGPT’s image generation or similar generative models) consumes electricity – as do many common household tasks. This report compares the electricity usage of creating one AI-generated image (in kilowatt-hours, kWh) to several everyday activities, highlighting the environmental impact (energy use and equivalent carbon emissions) of each. Below, we examine each activity’s typical energy consumption and, where available, provide an estimate of its carbon footprint (CO₂ emissions). A summary comparison table is included for quick reference. (Note: Carbon emissions are approximated using a conversion of about 300–500 grams CO₂ per kWh, depending on energy source. Lower values assume cleaner electricity, higher values a fossil-fuel mix.) AI Image Generation (Single Image) Generative AI models require computational power. Running a model inference to produce one image typically uses only a few thousandths of a kWh. Recent tests on various AI image models found an average of about 0.003 kWh per image generated (​theverge.com). This is on the same order of magnitude as the energy needed to charge a smartphone once. In fact, one AI-generated image can consume almost as much electricity as fully charging an average smartphone (​theverge.com). In CO₂ terms, 0.003 kWh corresponds roughly to 1–2 grams of CO₂. Why so low? Individual AI inferences are brief computations, often on efficient hardware. However, note that the training of such models is extremely energy-intensive (hundreds of MWh ​theverge.com), and widespread use of AI at scale means these small per-image costs could add up globally. Boiling a Kettle of Water Boiling water in an electric kettle is a common high-power task. To boil about 1 liter of water (from room temperature to 100 °C) in a typical 2–3 kW electric kettle uses roughly 0.1–0.15 kWh of electricity​ (theguardian.com). For example, one experiment measured about 0.112 kWh to boil 1 L in an electric jug kettle (​theguardian.com). This is about 30–50 times more energy than generating a single AI image. In terms of CO₂, one kettle-boil might emit on the order of 50–75 g CO₂ (depending on the electricity source). Boiling smaller quantities or only as much as needed can save energy. (For comparison, heating water on a stove or microwave is generally a bit less efficient. A microwave might use ~0.14 kWh to boil a cup, see microwave section.) Charging a Smartphone Charging a modern smartphone fully (from 0 to 100%) consumes a surprisingly small amount of energy: on the order of 0.01–0.02 kWh. The U.S. EPA estimates around 0.012–0.019 kWh per charge for an average smartphone (​theverge.com​epa.gov). That’s only 12–19 Wh – a tiny fraction of a kWh. The carbon footprint per phone charge is correspondingly tiny: roughly 5–10 g CO₂. This means that generating one AI image (≈0.003 kWh) uses roughly one-quarter of the energy needed to charge a phone​ (theverge.com). In other words, one AI image = 1/4 of a phone charge in energy. Both are very small in absolute terms. Playing Video Games (Console or PC, 1 Hour) Video gaming can draw significant power, especially on modern consoles or gaming PCs. The exact usage varies by device and game complexity: Game console (modern): A current-generation console like the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series can draw around 150–200 watts on average during gameplay, which is approximately 0.15–0.2 kWh per hour (​gamesradar.com). Demanding titles on a PS5 have been observed to push power use to ~200 W (0.2 kWh/hour​ gamesradar.com). Older consoles (PS4, Xbox One) or less intensive games might use a bit less (100–150 W). Gaming PC: A high-performance gaming PC (with a powerful GPU) typically ranges from 200 up to 500 watts under load (​energysage.com.) This equates to 0.2–0.5 kWh per hour of intense gameplay. An average gaming session on a mid-range PC might be around 250–300 W (~0.25–0.3 kWh/hour), whereas a top-tier rig can approach 0.5 kWh in an hour of play. Over an hour, gaming easily uses two orders of magnitude more energy than an AI image generation. For example, 1 hour on a console (~0.2 kWh) could power ≈70 AI image generations. Carbon-wise, an hour of console gaming might emit ~60–100 g CO₂ (if using ~0.2 kWh), while an hour on a high-end PC (0.5 kWh) could emit ~150–250 g CO₂. Using energy-saving settings, limiting 4K graphics, or enabling efficiency modes can reduce a gaming system’s power draw. Rendering a 3D Object (Graphics Software) Rendering 3D graphics or animations in software like Blender is a computationally intensive task, often maxing out CPU/GPU resources for extended periods. A mid-range desktop workstation can draw around 600–800 W when actively rendering (​blog.render.st). This means roughly 0.6–0.8 kWh per hour of rendering time for a moderately complex scene on a typical setup (​blog.render.st). In practical terms, a 10-minute render could consume about 0.1 kWh, and a full hour of continuous rendering might use ~0.7 kWh. That’s equivalent to 233 AI images (if each image is 0.003 kWh) or about 5–7 smartphone charges per hour of rendering. The CO₂ emissions for an hour of rendering could be on the order of 200–400 g CO₂. High-end workstations with multiple GPUs could use even more power, while simpler renders on laptops use less. (By comparison, idling or light 3D modeling without rendering is far less demanding.) Watching Online Video (Streaming 1 Hour) Watching an hour of streaming video (Netflix, YouTube, etc.) not only involves the electricity to

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Leaf & Core Comic

Leave a Comment / A.I, A.I Art, A.I Technology, Creative Writing, Design, Photoshop, Social Media /

It’s been 9 months since I last took on a personal creative project, and that’s simply because life got too busy. I transitioned from freelance to full time in order to better secure a mortgage and help improve my family’s living standards, which has meant a lot of personal sacrifice and less free time in general. On top of this, our house move dragged on for 11 months and the amount of admin to make sure it didn’t fall through was essentially a part time job. The good news… We got the house, after nearly falling through a dozen times we got the home of our dreams (at least within our budget). But it turns out that our new residence was by no means perfect. For one, it was at the upper end of what we could afford, in our starry eyed nature we overlooked some of the minor quirks that quickly became major issues that needed fixing. So my creative aptitude quickly moved from digital to DIY. I’ve been on the roof, scraping wall paper and polystyrene off the walls, painting, ripping up carpet, laying flooring, lifting heavy things which has lead to injuries… Lots of them… All while taking care of my work responsibilities and family. There is an end goal to getting this home in shape, and that is to get back to creating content! But the list of things needing to be done to get to that point is constantly increasing and I’ve found that I haven’t had the environment or time to push forward. But then ChatGPT’s new image features came out, and I saw a glimmer of hope. I’ve made some comics in the past and with the new ChatGPT update, I wondered if it was possible to create a new IP based on the art style of my past projects. After a couple of hours testing out the tools, I fed ChatGPT a character sheet from my animation Wayward Valley, some backgrounds from Frigsbys Ferries and a dozen face shapes from various digital art projects from my past. I told it my inspirations and my vision for the comic and that I wanted 2 characters ‘Leaf and Core’, a sentient rock and plant navigating the post-apocalypse trying to find meanings. And ChatGPT, took my old artwork as a base and produced something new. Now, it’s by no means a perfect workflow. I decide on a location and theme for the 4 panel comic and use ChatGPT to refine the ideas, there’s some clever prompting to keep the characters mostly consistent (although the panels are often photbashed and drawn over in Photoshop). I do feel like there’s a lot of me in the writing, it’s my attitudes and observations about the world that come through, and although ChatGPT will pitch in with line suggestions, I find that I’m putting more thought into that aspect. My wife says the comics aren’t funny but she laughs anyway because she has the context of who I am making them. In reality, I just wanted an outlet to make stories with the limited time I have to create. I have no incentive to get big numbers with Leaf & Core, or turn a profit, it’s a way I can explore ideas and bring them to life while adapting with AI, it’s probably closer to art therapy right now than anything else, there’s no pressure and I’m creating for fun. A much needed break from DIY after an injury has forced me to stop working on the house. There will be those who see Leaf & Core and poo poo it because AI has had a hand in making it. I think that mentality is a little short sighted and sad, as those I’ve shared the comic with have seemed to enjoy it. Me adding value to the world doesn’t stop other people being creative. It’s quite the opposite with these tools. Anyone can use them. But here’s the kicker, just like having an iPhone doesn’t make you a filmmaker, having access to AI doesn’t make you a creative. If you want that, you have to go create things. Anyone could look at Leaf & Core and do their own version of it for the next year, but why would they? When it’s easier and better for motivation to put your time into something that’s personal to you? We’re entering a world where we can make anything we want. It still takes time and commitment to see a project through. With that said, I will be posting the comics on Instagram But if you are someone who has stumbled upon this blog at the right time. You can see the first 9 comics here

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Massively Positive Sentiment Around My AI Music Project

Leave a Comment / 2D Animation, A.I, A.I Art, A.I Technology, Adobe Firefly, Animation, Design, Film & Video, Music, Photoshop, Social Media, Unconscious Collective, Video Editing /

I’ve got to say, I was a bit surprised by this. I would have thought that there would be a much higher anti-AI sentiment when this was posted. The content went out on reddit to 200K people and was on the front page of the ChatGPT subreddit for a day with over 667 upvotes, 147 comments and nearly 500 shares. The following is the description from the post: ‘I’ll be the first to say I don’t fully understand what’s going on with the backend of LLMs but I’ve just got the sense that it can tap into things outside of our comprehension. Without getting all woo, I wanted to see if it could give us any insights into the nature of reality, and maybe a creative medium like songwriting could open that up. If nothing else, it felt like a fun thing to do and it was. It wrote 7 songs which I then took to Udio. I did some editing in FL Studio to tidy it all up and remaster it. Then I’ve used Stable Diffusion and RunwayML to create a couple of shots and mixed that in with a bunch of stock. Edited it together in Prem/ After Effects to make this 33-minute video. Tools: Lyrics: ChatGPT Music Gen: Udio Music Mastering: FL Studio AI Images: Stable Diffusion AI Animation: RunwayML Stock: Stuff from Envato Editing: Prem + After Effects I’ve been working on this in the mornings/ evenings around work over the course of about 10 days. Why did I make it? It was a bit of a compulsion and it seemed like it could be fun, which I guess is the whole point. As scary as this technology can be, it’s a lot of fun and if you’ve not really got a whole lot of time for long-form projects because you work a 9-6 and have general life responsibilities, this certainly is a way of getting something interesting done quicker.’   Here’s a list of the positive things said: ‘It’s really great and intriguing! I hope this gets the traction and visibility it deserves!’ – HimalayanHaven ‘This is cool’ – SilentRip5116 ‘Thing I hardly ever do: Turnoff portrait mode…did here after a few seconds. Need to read the words. Need to listen fully, and the video was intriguing. Keeping watching once I realize the video is hella long. That was amazing, thank you!’ – Weak_Hospital_7854 ‘That was really beautiful, thanks for going through the effort’ – Then-Fish-9647 ‘Humanity is cooked. This is just too good.’ – 1smoothcriminal ‘I cried listening to the first one.’ – Aggressive-Dust6280 ‘I don’t know. I have to double comment. I just finished this and it feels groundbreaking. This is the first time AI art has moved me in such a way and it validates much of where I believe this is heading. Thank you, so much, for this wonderful piece of art.’ – Dadbeerd People couldn’t agree what it sounded like: I couldn’t help but think about Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist, in particular the family tree of ideas. Where good art is a remix of several other ideas, I found that this album was compared to several different artists, proving that this project had it’s own unique identity that could sit alongside similar artists in the indie-electronica genre. ‘This reminds me of M83 and Empire of the sun.’ – BoSt0nov ‘Real big MGMT vibes.’ – sprecher1988 ‘The voice is so similar to the singer of death cab for cutie, Love it!’ – fennforrestssearch ‘Daft punkgpt hits hard’ – Mtolivepickle ‘This has that Foster the People vibe and I’m digging it.’ – InterestingFrame1982 ‘Just me or does this sound like J. Timberlake vibes? (unreleased Future.Sex.Love.Sound) ‘ – Food_Kindly ‘Seems to me to be very Taylor Swift influenced.’ – Cloverboy56 ‘Pretty sure that’s a King Gizzard song.’ – issafly ‘Sounds like a Portugal The Man song’ – El_human The main criticisms were that the lyrics were a little too teenage angst, but what was funny to see was people arguing over the quality of the lyrics in the thread. This felt exactly the same as debates had around non-AI music. Prior to this album project I had used Udio to generate some IDM, downtempo/ experimental tracks:     There is something a little sad seeing this blow up and have more attention than most of my human made music. I’ve been dabbling in music production for nearly 17 years now and only had one track go viral, although in an obscure way where the credit didn’t really come back to me. I’ve spoken about that here, I remember being frustrated about missing out on the accolades and opportunities around the success of the song. Eventually that sadness and frustration subsided and I was just glad to be the catalyst to create fun memories and good times to the people who had listened. How do I feel about the small success of my AI music experiment? It’s a mixed bag and it’ll take some time to process. I’ll let you know in a later blog post

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