Tale of the Fox

War without war…

After watching Vietnam: The War That Changed America I wanted to try to make a wholly convincing news report style video on the revolution in Limanora [mentioned in passing in The Masked Men] but seen from the point of view of outsiders. US TV news reporting on the fighting in Vietnam had a very predictable approach and using ChatGPT to help me structure a short video, and sourcing a news reporter voice from archive on YouTube, I was ready to go.

Only there was a major problem. Actually, two problems.

First, MidJourney and Runway moderate their content to stop users creating violent, pornographic or politically sensitive material. They both have guidelines to stop you, for example, creating an image of a soldier bleeding or being shot. Ok, that’s their prerogative, but annoyingly the guidelines are policed by bots which apply the rules inconsistently, and will block content that is apparently allowed but the bot, being a bot, can’t recognise the difference between a solider lying on the ground one that is dead.

Second, it turns out that Runway can’t yet convincingly create gunfire except at extreme slow motion, or produce realistic walking or running of more than one figure. When I supplied Runway with an example video to create a new video as I had done in Dream Spaces with the punk band, any image or video of a soldier was blocked.

Naturally, I took my complaints online, first to the Runway account on Discord, then to Reddit, where, to my surprise, an official Runway rep got in contact to apologise for all the false blocks that were happening, refund my credits, and encourage me to try again.

I did, but the results were still not realistic enough to consider using. So my plans changed and I rethought my initial idea and came up with The Tale of the Fox. I think of it as a sort of a propaganda film as if directed by Tarkovsky, made by the winning side in the Limanoran Revolution. Instead of using news style literalism, this video leans more into visual metaphors for life and death, and revisits the Limanoran Fox that first turned up in The Islander.

This video also introduces the first spoken example of the Limanoran language that I developed with CHatGPT, a language that’s a mix of Czech, Portuguese and English. The grammar is English, the words, phrases and accents drawn from Czech with a smattering of Portuguese expressions. Those languages were chosen simply because Limanoran sounds cool, and it reminds me of my old friends Josef Stejskal, and his buddy Josef Truneke, two characters I worked with IRL at the UNSW State Library back in the early 90s. Listening to those two guys talk was such a soothing sound and I wanted to revisit it. The narration is generated in ElevenLabs, using a northern english voice named ‘Craig’ but speaking in Limanoran, then edited to vary the pace of delivery.

There’s no music in this video, but I went to town on the sound design, my favourite part of a production.

Can you make a war film without any actual images of fighting? Turns out you can, and although this is all fictional, I got quite emotional making it.