Next up: a song by Noise Margin
The next song I'm turning into a music video is "Cinderella After the Spell Broke" by Noise Margin.
I've gotten pretty used to making videos, and to turning AI stills into moving footage, so this time I worked out a story and concept that call for a bit more skill.
The big difference from my earlier ones is that I've kept the cast to a minimum. On top of that, I'm testing how far I can hold down that sense of something being off across a whole song. It's turning out to be really hard, and the time just keeps slipping by.
Character consistency and the budget problem
I suspect it would be a lot easier if I built this in a tool like Seedance 2.5, which is designed around keeping characters consistent. But it burns through credits, and I don't have the budget to keep using it. Partly for that reason, I'm going with the more laborious route.
Faces keep turning foreign
This time I'm mostly generating with GPT Image 2.5 and DomoAI 2.5.
DomoAI has a habit of quickly turning faces foreign. Even if the first frame shows a Japanese person, a few seconds later the face can have shifted to Western features.
Adding the word "Japanese" to the prompt helps quite a bit, but it also raises the odds that a different Japanese person walks into the frame. When it keeps failing, I often have no choice but to fall back on the omni reference.
Even so, generating with MiniMax H3's omni reference isn't a guaranteed fix. That uncanny feeling in AI-generated video is something I find genuinely hard to deal with.
Ways to reduce the uncanny feeling
The feeling that gives away AI generation is usually explained with the term "uncanny valley."
Beyond that, and this is purely my own opinion, I think the key to easing viewers' unease comes down to not making things look polished.
Keywords like cinematic, ultra-detailed, and 4K tend to produce very clean rendering. That, I think, actually makes the unease easier to notice.
In my case, I use looks that feel a bit like the past, such as "sentimental" and "nostalgic." I believe that blurring the viewer's own vision is the best way to cut down the uncanny feeling. The closer you push toward phone-camera quality or an old instant camera, the more vague spots there are. It may not sound great, but I often use it as a way to cover things up.
Adjusting color in post
For scenes where I really want things to look beautiful, I handle it in the video editing software. In other words, in post.
This isn't a new technique. Adjustments like color balance have been standard practice in video long before AI.
Since I started outputting video and stills with AI, setting aside the oddness of the people themselves, the thing that bothered me most overall was the color balance. AI tends to pull everything toward the average, so color also develops a look that's typical of AI video, and I think that strengthens the impression that it was made by AI.
So once I've gotten rid of the oddness in the people to some extent, I change the color balance of the whole frame. I think that's an easy way to move away from generic AI video. I adjust scene by scene to match the overall color, and sometimes I deliberately don't match other scenes, to create a sense of unease on purpose.
What to do this fall
So it's taking longer than before, but it's moving forward little by little.
It's slowly starting to feel like autumn, and it's also the last mowing season of the year. I haven't made anything to dedicate to the gods, like for the local harvest thanksgiving festival, but I still have far too much to do before the end of the year.
Making it for myself
Writing the lyrics, composing, making the video, and managing the footage, all by myself, really is a lot. AI has made some parts easier, but there are also plenty of times when AI is the very reason things stall.
I think the ideal would be to finish everything between humans alone. But I suspect this tug-of-war between life, reality, and the ideal is what makes my heart give out. Creative work in particular is something that can easily start to feel futile.
Even so, I feel I have to lean on "for myself" rather than "for someone else." When you try to chase a richer life, other people's opinions inevitably reach your ears. I think it's better to put my energy into the idea of leaving my work behind as proof that I lived. That's how I feel right now.