Taoist literature and history is filled with colourful characters, a few of them are real, others mythical, or even a mixture of both. Practitioners of Taoism were eccentric, often a result of the exotic herbs, elixirs, and potions some of them partook of. Liu Ling was such an eccentric, who lived in the third century. The care-free nobleman lived a life of “leisure, drinking, singing, making poetry with his friends, and forgetting the politically troubled times he lived in” (Kohn, 1993).
The use of botanicals and chemicals was a normal practice among Taoists and in particular, they used a drug called Cold-Food-Powder, which when combined with wine caused the drinker to experience the heavenly pleasures of the perfected mind they sought to achieve. Besides its addictive properties, this elixir also caused them to feel hot and take off their clothes, probably while reciting Taoist poetry.
This particular personage of Liu Ling has a poem dedicated to his carefree nature, and the short animation in the posted video is partly based on this poem (with a few artistic liberties).
There is Master Great Man-
For him heaven and earth are a single morning.
A thousand years just a short moment.
The sun and the moon are mere windows for him,
The Eight Wilds are his pleasure garden.
So begins the Jiude song (In Praise of the Virtue of Wine), which details the cheerful misadventures of Master Liu Ling, who travels "without wheels or tracks...without house or hearth" but always with his wine-cup and goblet. His cheerfully rebellious good nature soon attracts the attention of officials who-
flapping wildly their sleeves,
Pulling up their robes
Anger in their eyes,
They loudly gnash their teeth
They explain to me
The rules of ritual and order,
Raise for me their lances
To show what’s right and wrong.
But the worry-free master merely drinks from his cup and acts all drunk until he’s left alone, and the officials left with “ruffled whiskers.” Just don’t let it fool you, he’s not called a Master for nothing.
Without ever moving he gets drunk,
Then with a start he sobers up.
He listens keenly and watches carefully the world around him. It’s not that he’s not aware of what is happening but has simply chosen a path of engaged detachment in accordance with the flow of the mysterious Tao.
Unaware of the cold biting his flesh,
Unmoved by the afflictions of common greed.
This version of the Jiude Song was re-printed in Livia Kohn's the Taoist Experience: An Anthology, 1993.
I read the entire poem and using a pencil, I crudely sketched out images that popped in my mind, not worrying about the technical or artistic feasibility. The notebook I used allowed me to break the scenes into different panels like a story board or comic book. I do have basic experience with xAI Imagine video/animation software, but I had never attempted to create a cohesive story.
The Imagine software creates 6-second videos from a prompt, image, or combination of both, and to create a longer story, the clips need to be stitched together. The tricky part is keeping consistency across characters and scenes, and I quickly realized that my sketches were not really feasible as separate scenes. However, once I figured out how to keep consistency of characters and scenes across clips, then I used my initial sketches as general visual guidelines for the narrative, thus allowing me to maintain my artistic and production vision.
The trick for scene continuity in Imagine, as of publication, is to take a frame from a clip and re-Imagine it with your own prompt to guide the actions of the next sequence (Elon reposted this tip from an X user). I began with the creation of a single image that I had sketched out in my notebook. It depicted a man sitting under a tree smoking a pipe. The poem is about the Virtue of Wine (plus Cold-Food-Powder), but I find pipes more romantic and easier to handle than cups or goblets, so I took the liberty of adding a smoking pipe instead.
As you can see, I used 13 clips in MS ClipChamp to create the story. I generated the music in the excellent AI music generator called UDIO (beta), which allows you to use a prompt to generate any type of music of your choosing. I was trying to create a traditional Chinese instrumental sound with greater complexity than the one heard in the video, but try as I might, I could not bend the software to my will. The composition is more relaxing than I would like it to be. Thankfully, the Imagine video clips themselves contained music and sound effects, so I was able to enhance the music with the audio from the software generated clips.
The flow of the creation process was different than I expected from past experience. I created many more clips than shown in the video to sculpt the narrative. At one point, the software changed the gender of the protagonist, so I had to start referring to him as the “male apprentice.” The scenes with the two officials went smoothly. I was expecting more consistency trouble between clips. There’s a decrease in quality towards the end of the video, but that’s entirely my fault. Instead of using video editing software to extract single frames from the video, I used a screen-capture tool, degrading the quality of the original.
The software was remarkable in how it allowed me to direct the action with the prompt and a single image. I also tried to manipulate the sound by adding birds and other effects, but audio was not a focus in my video creation process.
I’m excited about this new tool in the AI arsenal. It gives creators a lot of control over the process. I’m sure someone with more experience could create even more complex and refined pieces than the one I made. Still, the tools are changing fast and providing more creative freedom to novices and experts alike. I hope you enjoyed the results.
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