Aquatic exploration films and documentaries about unexplained phenomena have always been a favourite. As I was completing ‘Desert Islands’ I realised that it’s now possible to revisit those long lost genres using AI video and audio generation. After a few test shots proved successful I decided to jump in [as it were] not realising just how involved it was going to be. The aim was to make something as close to absolute realism as possible, not just to see if it were possible, but to hopefully conjure the same kind of uncanny effect that some of the earlier videos achieved. This time however, I wanted some people in the video, some human looking humans, in a world that’s believable.
For those technical minded, the video was achieved using MidJourney to generate the images, and Runway to animate them. A few select shots were generated without MidJourney reference images. I estimate that the ratio of used to unused generations [lets call them takes] was about 5 to 1, but sometimes as many as 10 to 1 depending on how crucial it felt the shot was. Then I realised that all them are crucial.
The sound is a mix of sources. The narration is a voice clone of the uncredited narrator from Peter Watkin’s ‘Culloden’ [1964]. I ‘auditioned’ that voice and the narrator from Watkin’s ‘War Game’ but I really liked the clipped and precise delivery of Culloden. To get it just right, I need up editing the narration to fit the delivery of short precise sentences as in the source. ElevenLabs was used to clone the voice and their updated system allows you to tweak the expression, pauses and delivery, although they still haven’t ironed out the big where the voice pronounces certain words one way, and then another. As work began on ‘Mysteries’ I saw on Facebook that the BBC had decided to make their entire sound effect library available free to use to anyone anywhere! Another source for specific weird sounds was ElevenLabs text-to-audio sound effects generation. It worked incredibly well for most things, but somehow it thought ‘Emperor Penguins squawking’ was weird babbling voices like a South American radio station…
Music is mostly Egisto Macchi from his library music albums, but the key music under the titles is Sven Libaek’s ‘Sounds of the Deep’ from the album ‘Inner Space’.
There was a bit of work in Photoshop and Canva for titles, image editing and the TV news visual ids etc.
To get the right vibe for the fist half of the video I watched some vintage Rod & Valerie Taylor films available on YouTube. My memory of these old docos was that they were both benign and kind of boring. Revisiting them is a strange experience, especially the early films. They were about sea exploration and sharks, but in the absence of any actual science the films were mostly about finding sharks… and killing them. One doco was built around a guy who as a teenager had been bitten by a shark. Later in his 20s, he wanted revenge and dedicated his life to killing as many sharks as he could find, using a bespoke spear gun with a 303 shell tip. Thankfully no sharks were harmed in the making of this video.
sciencefictional.net 