Here is the prompt from The Thing from the Future that I selected:
Describe or narrate a scenario about an artwork found a century into a future in which society as we know it has come apart. Your description should address issues related to identity and elicit feelings of dread.
I decided to depict my scenario in 2 different ways. The first is using a free text to speech tool called Natural Readers. In my search for text to speech tools, I wanted to find one that sounded more natural than many of the voices included in free tools. Because this tool only allows for a few minutes of speech to text per day and does not allow for downloads, I ended up using my iPhone Voice Recoding app to record my text in two different parts. I then stitched them together and created the following audio file.
I also wanted to experiment with an AI video creation tool to create visuals for my text, however many of these tools are not yet released to the public (such as Sora), or they’re not currently free. I found a tool called VEED that would take my transcript and transform it into a video. However VEED has a time limitation, so it shortened my story. I noticed that the tool seems to be geared toward ‘Instagram-esque’ reel videos, including caption text with emojis superimposed on top of imagery. I found the emojis and the imagery that VEED selected to be interesting. It appeared to select emoji’s from key words that I used in my script, but they weren’t necessarily the best choices (in my opinion). For instance, when ‘work’ is mentioned, VEED selected a safety vest as the most appropriate emoji– not the best emoji for the context of the script. Additionally, the background imagery the tool selected was interesting, but they were also not particularly apt to the context of the script that I fed the tool.
I also could not download the video from VEED, so I used a screen recorder tool to capture the video during playback. I couldn’t crop the screen after downloading the video, so please don’t mind the multiplicity of tabs I have open. 😀
Here is the text version of my scenario, for those who prefer reading: Task 12 – Speculative Futures Text