Drone Jones is an experimental multimedia narrative project. It served as an exploration of how generative AI tools can be used in conjunction with one another to create a compelling audio-visual experience, mixing human and AI-generated music, synthetic speech, sound effects, and AI-generated images and videos for immersive storytelling.
Drone Jones
Workflow
This project began with an original idea for a storyline based on my friend’s musical alias as ‘Drone Jones.’ I imagined a character who combined my friend’s passions for producing music and flying in a sci-fi story taking place in an alternative version of the late 20th century, where Jones lives as a recluse in his desert workshop. A retired aerospace engineer, he tinkers all day with making music and creating drones that he flies into the sky to share his music with what he believes is an extraterrestrial species receiving his transmissions.
Brainstorming, storyboarding, NARRATION, DIALOGUE, & PROJECT MANAGEMENT
I shared this idea in as much detail as I could think of with ChatGPT to extrapolate the idea into a narrative world that could then be used to create distinct individual characters, scenes, dialogues, and action plans, and prompts for the other generative AI tools.
Speech synthesis
After revising the suggested script, I brought the narration and dialogue into Eleven Labs, where I created unique voices by combining several different clips available royalty-free on YouTube for each of the four characters: Narrator, Drone Jones, Waitress, Sheriff. Some of the lines of dialogue generated in the default voice tone were sufficient for my uses, but for others, I used the voice to voice feature, recording myself speaking these lines with the emphasis I wanted and then having the cloned voices emulate me.
MUSIC
I prompted Udio with specific genres and sub-genres, creating instrumental music as the soundtrack for this audio project.
Editing
I used Logic Pro to stitch together the generated speech, music, and royalty-free sound effects into a cohesive short story.
Still Images
I prompted Midjourney, specifically focusing on the Niji Journey aesthetic, to generate storyboard images corresponding to different scenes from the script.
Videos
I brought the Midjourney images into Runway to add motion to them, as seen above, and have storyboarded several related scenes with camera motion to add smooth animations.
