Sensible Shoes

When I gave up regular blogging, I threatened to engage in other creative pursuits, such as recording an album of my songs. I did that — two albums, in fact. This was the second one.

http://itunes.apple.com/album/id1799423135?ls=1&app=itunes

Now I’ve been working on videos for the songs. Here’s the latest one:

I wrote that song 40 years ago — and yes, that makes me feel old. At the time, I was dating a woman who never wore high heels because, to quote as best as I can remember, “I’m not going to ruin my feet just so guys can ogle my legs.” Around the same time, legendary Chicago columnist Mike Royko wrote a column in which he described the League of Women Voters as “a very fine organization, made up of upstanding ladies who wear sensible shoes and beige sweaters.” Boom. Song inspired.

The clips in the video were 100% generated by AI platforms such as Kling and Hedra. On the one hand, AI video scares me a bit. We’re at the point now where just because you see something happen in a video, it doesn’t mean it actually happened.

On the other hand, AI video is amazing. The cutaway clips of me singing in a club were generated from a photo of me — and yes, I told the AI engine to put some hair on my head just for fun. I was never in that club, and I never held that guitar. (I did play the guitar on the recording.)

For the subject of singer’s affections, I took an old photo of Chareva (with her permission) and told Kling to create clips where the face matched hers at 85%. So the woman in the videos looks a lot like Chareva, but not exactly. (And as she pointed out, Kling decided to give her a rather impressive pair of boobs.)

I use Logic Pro as my recording studio, and I love it because with all virtual instruments available today, if I can hear an instrument in my head, I can put it a song. Now we’re rapidly approaching the point where if I can see a video in my imagination, I can produce the clip. There’s still a lot of effort involved, and many of the clips that are produced get tossed because they’re not quite what I wanted. But just a few years ago, I couldn’t have produced anything like this video without hiring a crew and actors and taking a camera to lots of locations. What would have been a difficult and expensive video to produce now costs some time and some credits on the AI platforms.

More videos coming soon.