written by Maurice Cardinal …
Clip #2 in my 7 Part Series about designing with Ai;
I open this scene with a MOLIGOPOLY board crossfading to a DRONE and SMALL PLANE spraying chemicals over farm fields, as a semi-truck drives along Boardwalk Lane full of GIANT GMO vegetables. I placed chickens and pigs in open cages at the back of the trailer to represent the essence of a conventional factory farm. I learned quickly to keep the animals static to prevent Ai from injecting hallucinations, like pigs with feathers and five legs.
For clarity: Most of these examples are about one and a half minutes long, and contain several shorter Ai clips of 5-15 seconds each. I don’t include PROMPTS here for all of the clips, just the ones that are challenging or interesting from a messaging perspective.
It’s the first time the viewer sees animation and a caricature of ChemFarms (conventional chemical farms) that include feedlots for cattle, and Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) for hogs, and also chicken factories, plus… hydroponic vertical farm factories and monocrop fields and orchards that nationally require millions of tons of pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides. The truck’s LOUD horn blasts put a fine point on it. TOOT! TOOT! we’re coming through and heading to the morning markets in the ominous smoky city in the background.
At 0:00:07 the scene crossfades to a close up of the front grill of a semi-truck cab and hood designed to look like a SHARK, including eyes, nostrils and teeth, right down to the silvery shark skin colour. It took several hours of research and manual digital design to create a semi truck that looks like a shark. After combining my Photoshop drafts with Ai, I developed a dozen versions before settling on the shark in this scene. Ai throws tons of slop at you to sort through and log – some ends up as B-roll.
After you develop a unique model like this, which could also be a person, you have to lock it in so it’s consistent throughout the entire video. Once I decided on the exact look of the great white shark – colour, markings, mouth/teeth, fin shapes et al, I prompted Ai to create a photorealistic side view model, and then a reference CONTACT SHEET with various views of the same shark that include a profile, half profile and straight on face render. Each time I need a shark in a scene I include this shark contact sheet in the prompt as a reference.
Don’t underestimate the time it takes to create models like this. One small error get’s duplicated each time you use it, so you have to ensure your model is as perfect as possible and in web resolution of at least 1920 at 72 dpi for 21:9.
At 00:08 (8 seconds from open scene) a large great white shark bursts from behind the grill with mouth wide open, teeth barred and water gushing onto the highway. It’s designed to startle the viewer and is the first introduction of a shark that immediately swims out of the grill of the truck into the air past the camera and then dives into a ditch along the highway verifying that yes… this is a LAND SHARK.
The shark immediately surfaces in a ditch that runs between rows of corn and challenges the viewer to think differently about the relationship between farmers, consumers, and LAND SHARK PERSONALITIES.
This Ai film style is CINEMATIC SURREAL FANTASY. It’s critical to learn these terms because if you don’t tell Ai that it’s surreal fantasy, the shark would smash through the grill and skid along the highway on its belly because you didn’t give Ai permission to break the natural law of physics allowing it to swim through the air.
Ai fights with itself when the prompt does not follow natural physical rules. Remember, it’s created by a highly intelligent, atypical coder who sees primarily in black and white with little grey, so you have to be perfectly specific at every step. Fish normally swim in water and birds fly through the air. MY hallucinations… are artful, and rhythmically incredible. Ai hallucinations are mathematical mistakes with a fancy name 😉
If you WRITE a great prompt, but the reference IMAGE(s) contradict your text even slightly, the scene will stumble in confusion and deliver hallucinations you didn’t expect or want. Hallucinations are sometimes usable, but it’s usually just a waste of credits and money. I call them SLOOP, as in SLOP + BLOOPERS.
My video format for this project is widescreen, 21:9 so you also have to ensure you create models that fit this format.
After a startling surreal OPENING, at 00:22 (22 seconds) copy fades up;
“LAND SHARKS OWN AMERICA’S FACTORY FARMS; ALSO KNOWN AS INDUSTRIAL, COMMERCIAL, FEEDLOT OR CHEM-FARMS” It’s a brazen statement that surprises most consumers who have no idea that there are different types of farms.
The copy continues; EVERY SINGLE YEAR LAND SHARK FARMERS DUMP 500,000 TONS OF PESTICIDES, HERBICIDES, INSECTICIDES & FUNGICIDES ON FOOD YOU EAT.
ONE BILLION POUNDS EVERY SINGLE YEAR AND INCREASING
MANY FARMERS ILLEGALLY SPRAY GLYPHOSATE (ROUNDUP) ON THEIR CROPS AFTER THEY ARE HARVESTED TO DRY IT FASTER… SOLEY TO INCREASE THEIR PROFIT.
PLUS; EVERY YEAR AMERICAN FARMERS USE 21 MILLION TONS OF SYNTHETIC FERTILISERS ON FIELDS & HYDROPONIC CROPS
And don’t forget GMO & UPF’s.
NOW YOU KNOW WHY 22 AMERICANS DIES EVERY SINGLE MINUTE OF EVERY SINGLE DAY OF FOOD-RELATED ILLNESS.
WHAT DID YOU THINK WOULD HAPPEN?
I then crossfade ONCE MORE to the view of the shark swimming out of the truck’s grill and into the air as it ROARS and the scene ends.
BTW, did you know that a shark roars and growls like a lion? It doesn’t 😉 but creating that audio leap connects the viewer to the real world very effectively. The ROAR worked for MGM for 109 years.
I can get away with long copy in this scene because it happens fast in about 50 seconds after I surprised the viewer with the surreal vision of a menacing shark bursting from the truck’s grill. A surprise like this keeps a viewer hanging on to see what’s next, so I reward them by playing the view again without distractions.
This pattern is framed today on token economic gamification strategies based on the reward system BF Skinner developed with dogs, and applies perfectly to humans. It’s based on SCHEDULES of REINFORCEMENT and OPERANT CONDITIONING from his work in 1938.
These traits have been used for decades by POP singers, recently by Taylor Swift to generate hit after hit after hit. Once you understand this psychological concept you can apply it to anything. It also worked extremely well in the NFT era in 2021.
Ironically, Ai also heavily leverages this principle to sell its services.
I made the message personal in this clip and use second person “YOU” to drive the point that it affects the viewer directly. I want YOU, the viewer to own the information.
HERE’S THE 1st PROMPT;
Photorealistic scene opens with @Farms1 duplicated exactly full frame. Drone camera hovers for *1.5 seconds in the capture position of the original @Farms1 shot. All of the farms’ machinery is operating, cattle are milling, dust is blowing, polluted pond water steaming and rippling, smoke drifting, sun rising, drone and airplane are crop dusting. Lighting and atmosphere for all other graphics matches @Farms1 At the 1.5 second mark, from the lower right, @Semi, scaled in size relative to the GATE 5 Ranch gate, with all lights glowing, wheels rotating, and suspension moving slightly, the Semi drives into the frame moving left along the roadway straight down the center line as it passes in front of the farms. Animals and plants on the Semi trailer remain still. Immediately after the end of the Semi trailer passes the BeZon Plantation gate; the @Duster safely flies through the silver BeZon Plantation gate creating a vortex of pesticide and farm road dust. The Duster sprays all the way from the back fields into the foreground and also as it flies directly over the camera out of the frame. As soon as the Semi enters the frame from the right, the drone lowers and moves toward the Semi but stays wide and high enough to show the entire truck, and the Monopoly road including all the farms and city over the top of the gates. The drone tracks the Semi but moves forward faster as the camera pans slightly back. When the Semi reaches the “CHANCE QUESTION MARK” square, the drone moves down a bit as the camera pans slightly forward, and when the Semi reaches the “LUXURY TAX” square, the drone speeds up and crash drops to the Semi’s radiator level simultaneously flying in front of the Semi while rotating to zoom in on a wide close shot of the @Grill capturing road movement in reflections and of peripheral surroundings. The scene cuts after capturing 1 second of the wide grill shot, and ends the scene at 5 seconds.
*Some prompts are so complex it’s impossible to use precise 0:01:00 markers because Ai can’t always create an event in the time I allotted. I swing back and forth between both models dependant on the complexity. Sometimes, it’s best to let Ai run with it.
Here’s the 2nd PROMPT of the SHARK BIRTH:
Scene opens with a highly detailed photorealistic close up front view of this exact @Grill driving between dusty wind-blown dirt fields on a two-lane paved road that runs down the center, bottom half of @DirtCityFarms . The drone flies directly in front of the Semi at radiator level with the wide-angle camera lens facing the radiator at almost full frame tracking at the same speed as the Semi. One second after the scene opens, in a sudden motion the drone recoils moving farther away and a bit to the driver’s side. The lens simultaneously zooms out wide angle as a massive, glistening and menacing @SharkFace aggressively pushes its way out of the front of the truck, swimming forcibly through the pliable radiator as if it were being live born. Steam huffs, and ocean water flows from the Semi onto the road as @Fresh glides past the drone camera. As it swims by, the camera remains fixed on the Semi zooming ultrawide as the drone rises to the height of the windshield. Use the references @Semi and @SemiFront exactly as they are constructed including the trailer posters, and the types and positions of vegetables and animals on the trailer. Keep the chickens and pigs stationary. Adjust the hue of the shark so it matches the top of the Semi hood. Create @DirtCityFarms as the background with the city sunrise on the horizon.
To recap; Basically, I made a shocking statement, immediately proved its verity, backed it up with an image and then asked a rhetorical question the viewer will answer internally in the video’s favour as I show them the image once more to cement it in their minds to make it memorable.
A sequence like this is also reinforced through compliance where you make at least two true YES statements, that lead the viewer to agree on a follow up question, which in this clip was, “WHAT DID YOU THINK WOULD HAPPEN?”
I left the viewer with no choice but to agree.
Consumers still romanticise the farmer’s Ei Ei O nursery rhyme ditty with how all food is produced, but in less than one minute it’s possible to short circuit the behaviour by using SHOCK & REWARD respective of the WORDS in combination with an IMAGE.
Today, it’s more like OLD MacDonald HAD a farm, Ai Ai OH!
Here’s the 3rd vid for my SHARK FUN SOUP series…
Click Alien FOOD Processing to see how I wrote the activism message, manually developed graphics, and PROMPTED this third clip in my 7 Part SHARK FUN SOUP Series…
