When We Left Off …
I may have explained in the notes for Part One that this story is a subplot for 2 books I wrote in 2020 and 2021. Below is Part One which premiered last week.
I had started a third book in the series, and life at the start up where I worked became so crazy that I had to stop writing, and at the end of 2021, I left the start up. But sadly I never picked up the story again as there seemed to be too many other subjects to investigate, and life marched on. I’m trying to locate Part Three, and I’m not sure with the production schedule I have for the podcasts that I’ll have something ready for the 31st. We’ll see - sometimes I can pull these things off.
The story continues at the cemetery, but we pick up from Piotr’s point of view as he observes the entrance to the crypt that Pavel and Sasha have disappeared into. If you recall Part One, something has Piotr spooked, and in this segment we get to know Piotr better and what from his history has honed his instincts. I have to say, this my favorite part of the story. While in the books it is part of a larger plot that does jumps ahead to 1877 and South Dakota, whenever I would relay what I liked about the books to an author I knew as an acquaintance, he would say that I became the most animated when I described what happened in Prague segment of the plotline. His suggestion was to make the Prague plot into it’s own book, and that bit of advice has been nagging me for the past 2 years.
Video Production Challenges
This image took almost a half hour to get right, then I realized that there were wolves and not bears in the Piotr’s backstory. Still, I thought this was a good rendition of Piotr’s father losing a battle with a bear.
I was editing right up until 9 PM Sunday before this premiered - I always, ALWAYS, underestimate timeframes when I’m learning. Hopefully you’ll notice the visuals match the story better than Part One. The challenge here is that I am using Flux Schnell, a very detailed, free version of the Flux Model for image generation. The challenge with this tool is character matching or what they call character reference is not available with the web version of Flux that is free, so I am using a combination of tools. I start with a concept in Flux, keep rendering and experimenting until I find something that matches what I want. In Part Two we have to see the creatures, and they took a long time to create at first. These images have to be feed to another AI Image generation so variations that match the characters can be created. That’s the thing with AI image generation - it’s different with each rendition. The paid versions have mechanism to compensate, but they expensive, so after hunting around I found a free one that I’m happy with. It’s interesting to note that I have an Adobe subscription, and that platform is horrible at producing the grotesque features that I wanted. Partially because of capability, but also in in part due to restrictions on what you can render. Adobe terms of service will not let you render blood, for example.
Sometimes the AI hallucinates - it gave the bear human hands in glove, holding the axe. Adobe wouldn’t let me render this.
Writing AI prompts is surprisingly good practice for character descriptions. And laying out scenes as well. Think of a comic storyboard but in written form.
This prompt was what produce the Piotr and Yellow Eyes images:
Depict a cinematographic, silhouetted scene of Karla, a grotesque female vampire in a fierce winter storm at night. The scene is shot from an extremely low angle looking up at Karla who is high above, with her cloak stretched out like wings. From below Piotr stares up in fear at her.
Character Karla: Karla is a female vampire has extremely large eyes like yellow orbs, twice the size of a normal humans. Her mouth is full of jagged teeth, with ruby red lips and is twice the size of a human mouth, almost like the mouth of a shark. Her very large prominent forehead is lined with large, blue veins, her hair is receding and silver hair. She was at one time beautiful, but now is hideous.
Character Piotr: Piotr, a Russian, is a large man with broad, muscular shoulders, dressed in 18th century winter clothing. He has a large black beard and a fierce look of determination.
Layer 1: (Background): In the background depict a graveyard with gravestones covered with huge snow drifts.
Layer 2: (Middle ground) Karla hovers high above, her cape flapping in the winter wind. She is smaller than Piotr as she is high above, her silver hair is blowing in the gusts of wind.
Layer 3: (Foreground) Piotr, holding a flintlock, crouches as he attempts to aim the weapon at her.
Lighting: Ensure that this is a gloomy scene, with heavy atmosphere and dark shadows contrasted with gusts of wind and snow.
And these were some of the results:
The interior of the crypt was the last thing I did, and by Sunday at 6 PM I was really cooking with gas. I think the deadline made me make better choices with the prompting, as these have been my best renderings to date. The strigoi (vamps with the long tongues) turned out far better than I imagined they could.
So that’s Part Two, I know I’m going to go back and see what I can improve, these are really challenging because it’s all descriptions that you have type, and like rolling the dice, you hope something comes out that matches your vision. There are no really art tools in the sense that you can use Paint.Net, Photoshop or Illustrator. There are programs to install on run on your own computer, but I’m not quite ready for that.
Yet.
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