I turned my story That Dirty Bunch into an AI video. This is my second attempt, and it took me quite a bit longer, as it is a longer story, but I feel it turned out better than my first attempt, Thin Red Lines. It, once again, really helped me to understand the story better. The exercise of going from print to telling the story via video is really helping me to understand where the story could use improvement.  For That Dirty Bunch, I realized that I have way too many characters and way too much warm-up before I get to the main plot line.  The main storyline happens at a church, but I spend a lot of words (and later frames) getting to that point. I ramble on about why the narrative character is deciding to write down the events at this point and then why the boys were sent to church by themselves, going into detail as to how the mother was sick, and how the father was spending time caring for her and putting towels on her head. While they do add some color, all of those things are unimportant to the story and get in the way of the reader understanding what the story is about.

Does this mean you need to start turning your stories into videos to understand where they are going wrong? Not at all. I think there are much simpler ways. One practice I started doing with longer stories in particular is to break them into chapters and give each chapter a summary heading. Short stories typically don’t have chapters, but I find that by forcing each scene into a chapter and labeling the event (for example “Chapter six: Allen hits a long one”) helps to highlight the purpose of the scene. Seeing a scene’s heading alongside other chapter titles can tell me whether the scene should move to a different place or even whether it is needed at all.  

After this exercise is done, I do remove all of the chapters from my short stories before submitting. While you technically could leave them in, it is uncommon enough to give an editor pause.

I am already working on my next video — a Sci-Fi comedic short. I have jumped to Higgsfield.ai for that, as it seems to be the top-end tool everyone is using. There is a bit of a learning curve for me as I have gotten used to Google Flow and I can already see where it is going to be quite a bit more expensive, so I may end up using a combination of tools to keep the costs down. I mention this as I suspect some of you may want to try your hand at this too. It is rewarding to see your stories come to life and, while I am far from being where I want to be with my video creation talents, I am enjoying the journey.

-James