Day 2

Not much happened today, actually feeling a bit sluggish and ended up taking a long (and comfortable) nap in the afternoon, but feel have headache and tiredness. So will sign off early today.

Learnings

• Animate fire in Pika Labs
• Extending/looping music seamlessly
• Created a longer video (10 mins)

What did I do today?

Image and animations

Started the day with another music video. Originally I was trying to repro the leave animation created by Pika Labs yesterday, but that didn’t work. Then I switched gear to generate something and see how to animate that. Looking out the window from my desk, I saw the gloomy weather and I was feeling cold (due to the broken heater). So I set out to create a warmth ambience with rain for my video. Creating the scene was easy with Midjourney. Took a couple of prompts, but the results were really good. Then I wanted to add some rain drops the background.

I thought about adding the rain myself using either Davinci or Blender. Looked up the tutorial for both, but found it too be too complicated. Then I went back to Pika and used /animate for one of the generated picture without any prompts. And it actually worked really well!

It was able to understand the scene without any prompt and knows that the fire in fireplace should be moving and animated that. However, it somehow also think that the trees in the background should also moves…

(Sorry can’t insert video for some reasons)

I then selected another generated picture and asked Pika to specifically animate the fire, and it did a good job, and even animated the candle in the porch that I didn’t even realize was there. The down side is that the animated fire went a bit overboard and is going outside the fireplace. But I kept that anyway since I like the glowing of the fire reflected on the chair next to it.

Midjourney
inside modern wood cabin, mood lighting, big window, rainig slowly falling outside the window, 2d art --ar 16:9

Pika Labs:
Prompt: a moody scene inside a fancy cabin, there's a wooden fireplace to the left, please animate the fire Image: 1 Attachment

The video

I spent a bit more time today on the video. Knowing all the steps needed to create a video similar to yesterday’s, I was able to get the basic done quickly. Then I added a few more extras today:

• Added fade in and fade out: This is more time consuming than I thought because I have multiple layers to coverup the logo, so I had to adjust accordingly. But know that I know how to do it, it shouldn’t take more than a couple minutes next time.
• Trimmed the intro of the song: the song started a bit too slow for my taste so I trimmed it
• Looping the song: I wanted to make the video longer, so I wanted to extend the song. This part is the most time consuming since it’s difficult to find the best spot to loop the song. It has to be seamless, otherwise it would sound bad and jarring. I spent lots of time cutting, trimming, fading, and finally was able to make the seamless transition. The video is now 12 minutes long.

Here’s the video:

After 12 hours, only 4 views 🙁 But that’s okay. The key is keep making and keep experimenting.

Making money?

Ended the day with some youtube videos about monetization and how people are making money from these AI generated arts/images. One were about creating emotional videos for long distance relationship and post them as reels/stories and then sell merch. Another one was a cute animal instagram page. Last one was about selling printed arts on Etsy.

All these have in common is that they capitalize on a niche audience/market such as LDR or modern art. This is because they want to create a niche/small but powerful followings so create a bigger audience.

Another video I saw the other was someone using ChatGPT to generate a children story and use Midjourney to generate the images to match the story. Then they sell the book on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing.

Follow ups

• leonardo ai
• kaiber
• bing image generator (with DALL-E 3)
• harmonai

Thoughts

Play the game. Get good at the game. Change the game.
Still feel like I’m not making progress fast enough. But that’s okay (ref: Kickstartiing – To Remember)
Writing these end of day journal is kinda cathartic. And it actually make me feel like I had a more productive day than I thought.