The Ascension Algorithm

Synthetic media project by Matthew Lau & I.

(A small note — the original video file contains some noise texture that gets compressed when hosted and played online. I've added screenshots of how it's supposed to look at the bottom of this post).

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As mentioned in the previous post, Matthew and I chose Julio Cortazar's Instructions on How to Climb a Staircase.

We used ChatGPT to generate instructions on how to climb a staircase for machines (or robots) that are based on Cortazar's text. Then we used that text to generate prompts for each step of the instructions. We used Midjourney for generating an image for each of the prompts. We tried using both RunwayML and StableDifussion, but Midjourney turned up the best results in terms of coherence and aesthetics. We used each image as the first frame in RunwayML's image/text to video gen-2 model to generate videos.

After getting all the videos in order we added the voice-over and background music and made adjustments in terms of length of each scene and transitions to make it all work together. We also added some effects in order to fully reach this aesthetic we were going for — a fusion of old-timey black and white film, but also a mix of modern sci-fi elements.

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We'd like to thank Octavio Figuera for doing the voice-over part and also for recommending complimentary background music.

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