Jurassic France

There comes a time in every year, whether I am working at the library, wandering the trails of the Mississippi River, or enjoying a retirement in the south of France, when I am compelled to add dinosaurs to my surroundings. The first iterations of these kinds of images were probably done in and of the Roseville Library and predated any functional AI's. Back then I would have to digitally cut out meticulously collected images of dinosaurs and carefully match them to scenes of my library, hoping for something approaching realism.

The level we're at nowadays is ridiculously better, and it is only the fact that we have become jaded by what is so easily possible now that prevents what I think is the proper "gee whiz" reaction. Nevertheless...

Gee whiz!

I mean seriously.

These are just casual scenes of where I have been walking around the past several days, which, first of all, is kind of a neat place to live for all our issues with it, and then, more specifically and amazingly, it now has dinosaurs!

While I am delighted to self aggrandize, that is not my point here. This still takes some skills, just not a ton of them. Mostly it is merely the delight in the magic trick that I exult over here, as the viewer more than as the creator. It is a pleasure in such wonderment that I simply hope you might share.

 

Baroque dinosaurs

 

Two days ago I had some dinosaur pictures to show you. I had taken these pictures down by the river and, after much working with them, I ended up with several variations of pictures of these prehistoric animals in the river woods. My two favorite versions were the vanilla variety, which were realistic images of the scenes, and versions inspired by Caravaggio, or, to some extent, inspired by the best painting interpretations of dinosaurs from before the age of computer generations. I decided to show you the photographic variations the other day, but I really liked the painting ones too. I liked them too much to just leave them behind, it turns out, and so I am hoping you can bear seeing much the same pictures you've already seen, but with a very different feel to them. 

Dan Dan Dan

I'll admit this might not be the most appropriate video project, nor one for me to have taken so seriously. But my co-worker Dan is something of a bizarre muse to me, amusing in stories, funny in a series of "Mini Dans in the library" pictures where he is so tiny he can hold up towering books like a human bookend, and now he is appealingly reproducible in AI video with his distinctive features and expressive... qualities. So the lark of putting him drunk in alleys with dinosaurs just sort of ran away with itself, leaving me with something approaching a two minute movie. Yes, twenty seconds might have been a more appropriate length for all of this, but there's simply so much irresistible Dan in this movie! Well, irresistible to me, and it even has the suggestion of a storyline! Although as to that, you'll have to supply a fair portion of it for yourself. 

I wrote a whole thing here about how to watch this now on clerkmanifesto and then found my video is simply too fat to show here, so we're back to directing you to YouTube, for today at least. Click on the picture to watch the (possibly painfully long- depends on how much of a Dan fan you are) video. 

It has meticulously crafted (only sort of fake) music, so turn up your stereo system.