TITAA #70.5: What Is a Door, Anyway?
Alien Rocks - Yetis - MJ Styles - Glifs - Drivelology - World Models - Narrative
Table of Contents (section links on web page):
Opening bit… making doors.
Weird News (Art, Archaeology and Folklore, Science, LLMs and AI)
On Friday, I tested out stitching together some of my recent favorite things — the new Midjourney styles explorer, video start-end frame generation, and “open doors.” I generated a lot of images of “an open door” in different styles, just to see what the styles made of that “open” prompt. Where would the door be? What would be seen through the door? What position would we be in, as viewer?
I was as bemused by them as I was by Nano Banana putting a hinge on the wrong side (my last post here). What is a door, anyway? I didn’t expect to be asking that, but I guess the Midjourney v7 model was.
Lots of doors open on darkness, which was a little disappointing for my planned video montage. But oddly, there were some themes: doors that stand alone in the wilderness, in no wall or frame. Doors in walls painted with their own scenery of wilderness or strangeness, and a very related view beyond the door (why?). Doors that don’t fit their frames. Doors that are broken, beside other broken doors, doors that lead to impossible geometry. Very few people through doors, but sometimes birds or little animals. A strange checkmark on the wall (5 across, 3 down above).
I did some work to animate a few, checking out the tools folks are using now and that I advertise here all the time.
This video was made using Kling Pro start and end frames, image editing for the closed doors by Seedream 4 on Replicate (and a little bit of Nano Banana), and MMAudio — done via Glif.app tooling I made by modifying someone else’s. Also put together in Premiere Pro, for the end frame and last clip fades. Expensive tool for a few tweaks.
Lots of people are doing this kind of thing with other models and sites. After making it, I saw a very nice video on X displaying styles, made entirely with Midjourney’s start and end frames, which I had actually forgotten about :). Sure enough, right in MJ I made a good looping video of a door open and close, without even an end frame — so my workflow could’ve been even easier. Looking forward to that API, Midjourney.
Onto the news of the past 2 weeks and the news of the weird from the past month! Included below: Seedream 4, 👉🏼 new video models, 👉🏼 yet more 3d world models and 3d museum work, 👉🏼 Story Arc engine and visual story writing, 👉🏼 game movies, 👉🏼 Yeti legends and local deities, 👉🏼 Mars in tiles, 👉🏼parasitic AI, 👉🏼 Alien rock language, 👉🏼 more conscious AI, 👉🏼 a dataset of drivel and a huge dataset of 3d buildings, 👉🏼 weird science, 👉🏼 some named entity NLP work, 👉🏼EmbeddingGemma, and 👉🏼 various useful tutorials.