"This is really a beat generation...a swinging group of new American men intent on joy..."
Jack Kerouac
There are stories that have been told repeatedly in several ways, and as technology changes, some of those stories bear repeating in the new mediums. So, I decided to experiment with some old lit, AI music, and generative art. This is my first post in the Hive Book Club community, and I didn't see anything about the use of AI, so if I have broken the community rules, please let me know so I won't do it again. :)
The words in the posted video are from Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
On the Road was a widely read novel in the USA that influenced the development of counter-cultural groups. The Beat Generation, or beatniks as they were called by popular media, brought about a new rebellious independent post-war style that emphasized individuality, exploration, and self-expression. The mad ones. They were proto-hippies who helped give rise to the 60s generation in the USA and bring about a cultural revolution that echoes to this day.
For the video, I used AI generated images from the 40s, 50s, and 60s in San Francisco, giving them a vintage look for kicks. Some of the characters are from personages of the era while others are just random people. I did not sweat the image details, so most of them have that AI funkiness visible in limbs and other body parts. The main idea was to capture the literary flavour of the eras (40s and 50s) in which this sub-culture thrived, while giving a nod to those that came after (60s, 70s).
The narration was voiced by MS Clipchamp's text-to-speech agent (Brian). I had to play around with the punctuation in order to elicit the right intonation, speed, rhythm, pitch, etc. The app is limited in what it can do with the voice function, particularly when it comes to emotion. I'm not fully happy with the result (especially the ending of the narration) but given the app limitations, it's not too bad.
Uncle Bill
Mr. Howl himself
Jack ready to step on the gas and go! go! go!
The music track is called Pulse and Brass, which I created using the AI Music Generator called Udio. I prompted the software to develop a jazz song mixed with electronic sounds. Several pieces were generated, and I chose the one that sounded closer to what I had in mind.
The women of the Beat Generation were more independent that their mothers and were surely influential in the later waves of feminism that rippled through western cultures.
The Beat Generation was a literary force of poets, novelists, essayists, journalists, and mad prophets who defined a generation and planted the seeds that later bloomed into the flower children of the 1960s. On the Road was an influential book in my life and the lives of many others, so it was a lot of fun creating the video and putting together the different elements (i.e., audio, video, images, and narration). It gave me that rush that I experienced when I first read the novel as a young dude. Thank you for coming along!
Images generated by @litguru using Generative Art software
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