The Castaway (An audio-visual narrative)

I’ve been writing a series of sea-faring micro-tales on Twitter along with some generative art. This time I decided to publish on hive and add some audio-visual effects into the mix. I used Microsoft's Clipchamp to develop the video. It has some interesting text-to-voice features, which I'll discuss at the end.

To sum up the tale, a "doctor" is on board a fishing vessel of sorts with a motley crew. He's asked the men to bring him any cuttlefish they find, so he can study them. The men do so, for a price. Then one day they find a man from the orient floating aloft on the water in a skiff. The shipmates are suspicious of him. The grateful man gives the doctor a vial of strange ink. The scene in the video takes place soon after that. Here's the script, along with the images I used.

Mori-san has disappeared... The men swear they haven’t seen him. Perhaps he was a ghost, they mutter. Maybe a ghost ship came for him in the night. Or the albatross of death whisked him away- and so on with all sorts of fanciful yarns.

Maybe the knaves took matter into their own hands. This fog is making them mad and bringing out their superstitious nature... I do fear the worst...

Of his existence, the only thing I have is the mysterious vial of ink. Its properties are remarkable. Almost bewitching. I am a servant of science, but truth be told, this liquid puts my logic and reason to the test.

The voice in the recording is not great but not too bad either. The voice I hear narrating the story in my mind is raspier, deeper, and more mysterious. The audio is missing the right inflections at certain moments, which are necessary to insert a dramatic effect. I also had to play around with the spelling to get the right intonation. The app does give you the ability to alter the tone and pitch, as well as the speed of the speaker. You can choose different sounding voices and accents too, so this is cool. These functions imbue the voice with some semblance of personality. I did have to alter the story because the older draft didn't sound right when narrated. So, I edited and re-edited the story until it worked okay-ish with the voice.

The images are closely intertwined with the tale. I generated them iteratively using the imagery from the written draft, and vice-versa.

I hope you enjoyed it.

Images, audio, and video generated by @litguru using video-editing and Stable Diffusion software

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