This project is a video I made to advertise my upcoming book, Library of Lessons & Lies.
Combining a variety of AI technologies, I wanted to have a character interact with my social media audience to promote the book. In the past, I've seen other authors do an Ask Me Anything with their characters. Here I thought it would be an interesting spin to have the audience interact with a video of the character.
Starting with a script
I used Jasper.ai to help me write the script for the project. I sketched out what I wanted Beatrix (the character) to say and then asked Jasper to rewrite it to be more engaging. After getting the output, I modified the content to ensure Beatrix's voice from the novel was here as well. It was important to me that Beatrix sounded consistent from the book to the video.
Why use Jasper?
I am not great at writing promotional content. Jasper is an AI tool targeted at Marketing Copy. Using the templates in Jasper, I was able to build a commercial quickly that was a good jumping off point to customize. I did not keep 100% of what Jasper produced but used it as guides to discover the right things to say to push the call to action.
Voice Over
With the script written, it was time to give Beatrix a voice.
I know what Beatrix looked like and sounded like in general from the novel. I could hear her voice in my head but its really difficult to manifest sound directly from my brain. So, to start, I had to select a tool for the voice over which would allow me to find "the voice" in my head.
There are two tools I use for AI voice over, Murf.ai and Replica Studios. Both are excellent. Replica has a large library of very diverse and dramatic voices. These voices are great for gaming or dramatic readings but not for a commercial like this.
I decided to go with Murf.ai.
Why use Murf.ai?
Murf.ai had a large library of natural / narrator voices. I thought that would fit my scenario better.
None of the voices were perfect but I was able to take one of them and alter the pitch & speed to get it more in line with my vision of the character.
The final audio is above.
Beatrix's Appearance
Beatrix is described in the book but not in extreme detail. I like the reader to be able to see the characters in their mind's eye but fill in the details so the reader creates the story with me.
Beatrix's defining feature is that she has purple hair and bright blue eyes. I knew she was white and college aged.
My initial character designs actually started in Daz3d but I abandoned that after not getting the face quite right. I'm not sure what's right, it just wasn't working for me. From there, I jumped over to ArtBreeder to try and splice some images together and find Beatrix from there. I knew this wouldn't produce a final product but wanted to start here and refine.
I feel like a key element to all my work with AI is "start and then refine".
Here's the result of the initial step with ArtBreeder:
But I wanted to make some small changes and get variations from this work. I took the image here and jumped into MidJourney to see what variations I could get from this face. The prompt I used to get started:
<reference image> with purple hair
That created the following output:
Then it was tweaking the hair cut, tweaking the cheeks, tweaking the eyes and complexion. There were multiple re-imaginings of the image and finally ended up with the rendering I took into Photoshop.
You'll notice this is very close to the final image. Using Photoshop's Neural Filters (Smart Portrait) I adjusted a few things about Beatrix's face, removed the rouge hair and filled out her face a little further. Also, notice the loss of the puffs in her hair. Beatrix isn't that fun so I didn't think that was in character for this image.
Deep Fake
With the face set, the audio built, I was ready to animate with D-ID.
While I like D-ID's Studio, I definitely want to keep exploring other Deep Fake tools to build more expressive faces and create a better range of emotion for my characters.
I just needed to upload the image of Beatrix, then pair it with the audio track of her monologue and D-ID did the rest.
Final Product
Outcome
My hypothesis was that having something like this would create interaction with the character but it did not. In the end, the only question I was really asked was, "How did you do that?"
I think I might be a little too far ahead of the curve for what I was trying to achieve but that's okay. It was a fun project and I built skills that I'll be using on future projects.
Thank you for visiting my project. I hope you enjoyed the trip through how I built Beatrix's AMA video.
