Creating a visual representation of what Ethereal looked like was significantly more difficult than I had anticipated it to be. As I was creating this world’s description during visual 1 I thought I had a pretty good idea on what I wanted my world to look and be like, which helped me a lot. However translating the image that’s in my brain into words proved to be difficult for me. Configuring my GPT to match the aesthetic of Ethereal wasn’t that difficult but getting into specific types of cameras and lighting required me to do a bit of research despite that I have done some photography in the past.
When it came to creating the storytelling part I had no idea where to even begin so asking GPT for ideas was my starting point. I picked a story that reminisced with me, about a girl who makes art. I had GPT generate descriptions for scenes including the camera shot. Generating the images to achieve the look I wanted was where I definitely faced the most challenges.
Since Ethereal has a classical roman inspired architecture I thought that for clothing design having ancient civilization inspired clothes would suit this utopia looking mythological world. What I did add to the clothes was having lots of patterns, jewelry, and beads to add more details. At first I tried to have characters have a little moon stone in their foreheads but when I generated that the people looked like robots because GPT interpreted it as something mechanical, I played around with this look at first but didn’t like it in the end. For Lira the character of my story I didn’t have an specifications for the way I wanted her to look but she appeared in several of the scenes but the way she looked kept changing so consistency was not being kept very much. I had to take the character design that I liked the most and then edit the scene images by asking it to change some of her features but for the most part her look didn’t change.
As I was making the scenery I noticed that it was almost like the GPT would forget or dismiss my instructions on the types of photos I wanted because I needed to remind it of the aspect ratio and tell it to make things more colorful. As I was going through this process I ended up making a few alterations to the overall look of my world by making it even more colorful and making the environment look exotic.
At first I tried to make the images look photorealistic but as much as I tried using different terms it never seemed to. Instead it made a video game-like design which I actually liked. I think it added to the aesthetic and made it feel even more well Ethereal.
Here is the link to my presentation:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11LEbCqy_0adixAcx7vY5XDdUOwnAKTX409GU5Jn3Etk/edit?usp=sharing