More Adventures in Crappy Filmmaking

It's a new medium, but what can you use it for?

The new AI video from Google, Veo 3, seems pretty neat as it actually does audio along with video. That seems to solve the problem of lip sync never looking quite natural.

And with the introduction of Veo 3 fast, it was finally cheap enough for me to play with (I miss when all my AI experiments were paid for by my employer; I’m back to self-funding).

So anyway, really neat tech, but what can you use it for? I decided to play around by bringing some old tweets of mine to life. I mainly used Veo 3 fast, which the result look a bit plasticy, but whatever. And for the first three, I did image to video generating and image in ChatGPT first.

Here’s Commissioner Gordon on Batman’s most formidable foe.

Here’s Sun Tzu talking about war.

Here’s Aristotle talking about Batman.

Okay, so you can make a quick 8-second clip, but I tried to play with Google’s Flow to see if I could make something coherent longer than that.

It wasn’t easy. Somehow, it just automatically keeps the voice consistent for the same characters, but getting it to cut in and be consistent and have the right person say the right thing took some practice. I ended up using about half my month’s credits to make these 21 seconds, but hey, we learned some things.

Also, the background noise wasn’t consistent between the clips, so I had to use AI to remove it (which may have messed up the sync) and then ElevenLabs to generate something to replace it with.

And the results are… okay. Pretty okay. The first part was done with Veo 3 Quality and the rest with Veo 3 Fast.

Anyway, this fascinates me because I just know there is something interesting that can be made with this. I don’t know what yet, and there is a lot of limitations to work around (don’t try to get the virtual people to act), but man it’s… neat. And I’m determined to figure out what it can be used for.