In The Game of Life, Don't Forget Your Side Quests
In the game of life, don’t forget your side quests.
What I mean by that is we get so caught up in our enormous main quest goals, grinding career XP and farming gold to survive and thrive in this competitive open world landscape of modern Earth, that we too often miss beautiful and serendipitous experiences along the way.
I’m saying this with complete self-criticism, but whatever our big goal of the moment is, it's all too easy to be consumed with it to the point where there is no room for anything else.
But really, it's the little things in life that make for some of the best experiences and memories.
The Game of Life truly is about the journey, not the destination.
Side quests don’t have to be epic, they could be anything; like taking a break in your routine to call a friend that you haven’t talked to in awhile or making plans to go out on Saturday nights. Do something out of your routine to connect, refresh perspective, and find new motivation from this world.
Personally, I find new perspectives and experiences, no matter how small, to be some of the best sources of creative inspiration. And there is a wellspring of it waiting just outside our normal habits and routine.
It also goes for relationships, whether it's a friend or a romantic interest, relationships take work. They take effort. Sometimes it's easy to ignore that when we're über focused on whatever our current goal is, but relationships and shared experiences make for the essence of a great life.
You hear so many accounts of people later in life that say, "I regret not spending more time with family. I regret not making time for this person. I regret not having more fun or having more experiences or creating more memories" It's because that is the stuff that does matter.
And I say all this talking directly to myself as a complete hypocrite.
But in the end, with the fickle nature of life, you really do have to take the time to enjoy everything along the way.
So, don't forget to do a few side quests.
~ Michael
How I Made The Video
I started off by just shooting a basic vlog and then completing and locking the edit so that the time of different sections would always remain the same.
From the script I brainstormed a handful of game characters that I liked and thought might fit best in the different sections.
Once I had the character sections mapped out, I noted down the starting timecodes of each section and trimmed and exported each clip for transformation into different characters with Kaiber AI.
Kaiber has a limited credit system, plus AI generation takes a good amount of time to render, so I wanted to be efficient and only transform the exact length of the sections that I needed.
Once I had the transformed clips of the different characters, I re-imported each clip and matched them to their original timecodes layered on top of the original footage (this is why it was so important to mark down the timecode of each that they could easily be lined up with the original footage).
After all the clips were aligned, I added some simple transitions in Davinci Resolve (the editor I’m currently using), did some audio leveling and a quick color grade, and then exported the video.
From there I ended up adding and editing the music parts in CapCut (another video editor with built in sound/music libraries) since their music library had the best options to match the tone of the video. I then leveled the dialogue with the music and exported the final version to be uploaded to YouTube.
Done!
Note: This is just a quick and dirty overview of how I did some of the technical stuff around this video. I’m still experimenting and finding my voice with this newsletter (and content in general), so if you have any thoughts on whether its useful or should have more / less detail, please let me know!
Until next time, here’s some:
Exciting AI Tech
Bing Image Creator (DALL-E 3)
Along side the release of DALL-E 3, the new version of OpenAI’s text-to-image generator, the same functionality was added to Bing and released for free! Initially it was thought that this would be a paid feature, but it is pretty big news to have this released to the public without cost. Many text-to-image generators out there like MidJourney or Stable Diffusion either have monthly fees or take powerful hardware and technical knowledge to use, so this is a big step forward in the overall generative imagery landscape. I’ll definitely be playing with it a lot more in the future and possibly cancelling my monthly MidJourney subscription if it lives up to the hype!
Kaiber AI - Motion Mode
Kaiber is the app that I used to generate the game characters for the video in this post. They’re video tools so far have proven to be more consistent and accurate than the competition in my experience. They recently added a “motion mode” that claims to smooth out AI video even more.
Very good advise! Excellent use of characters to get your point across. Keeps your attention very well. I also appreciated your sharing the various AI platforms you used to creates this video. You went into detail about them and even supplied their link. Quality man; The Artful Algorithm!!!