Reinvigorating an american icon for today
What is the full potential of AI in bringing back historical figures? This endeavor required us to establish new AI working pipelines to synchronize a 3D representation of Mark Twain with his vaosl. A parallel challenge was to identify and pilot implementation strategies.
Creative Direction, Visual Designer
Team
Elizabeth Wang- Researcher
Isabel Fleck- Creative Technologist
Role
Creative Director, Designer
Duration
3 Weeks
Skills
Prototyping, Presentation
Tools
Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, Convai, Unreal
Promotional Video
Mark Twain is an important part of American history
However, if we’re not careful that’s what he will represent to contemporary audiences– a man stuck in the past. Generative AI allows for us to bring Twain’s worldview into the 21st century, and authentically learn and grow through conversations with modern thinkers. TwainTV brings an unique avenue for interactions with the audience, and reimagines how AI could be used to respectfully bring back historical voices.
The biggest thing we were concerned about is Mark Twain's salience in the 21st century. We can see through this Google Search trend that Mark Twain has slowly been losing popularity over the past 10 years. Our north star for the project then became: was how might we engage our 21st century audience?
Podcasts have been rising in popularity recently especially for younger generations, and provided a fresh take be engaging the audience and to put a spin on the application of Mark Twain.
After researching into current podcasts, we can see that the podcasts hosts all have a strong personality and opinions on things. With this we decided to lean into the personality-driven facet of podcast creation with Mark Twain
Final Reflections
Get the backup, of the backup, of the backup
This project was not just a concept pitch, it was also a test on execution. A live demo was needed. When I tested the demo an hour before the pitch it was working fine. Then 15 minutes before we were to go up I got a bad feeling, and sure enough– the demo had inexplicably stopped working. Luckily we had backups: an Unreal version was the first version, when that crashed we had a desktop version, and if that failed we had a voice-only version that we could use. Thankfully we only had to go to the desktop version.
Finding ways to overcome personal qualms
When this project was introduced to us, I was initially very uncomfortable with the idea of bringing a historical voice back. We didn’t want to disrespect the voice, but we also had to acknowledge times have changed– a 19th century figure was just simply not going to fit into the 21st century. Once we realized that the fish-out-of-water disconnect could actually be something to leverage rather than shun, we were able to explore more avenues.
Feedback
A fresh take
This project culminated into a project that we pitched: TwainTV takes on an innovative and youthful approach to reconnecting Mark Twain to the modern audience. It is something I never considered, which is part of the reason why I wanted to set this challenge to students in the first place.
Considering the amount of time
This project is designed to be a sprint- with only 3 weeks on this project from concept, to development, to final pitch. We were pressed for time, all the while exploring a technology none of us were familiar with. We quickly defined and prioritized between what needed to work and what would be nice to have. This helped us keep the focus small, and make sure we were never too focused on either on the technical or the conceptual.
Acknowledgements
To the most amazing team
This project was a sprint from beginning to end, and I really appreciate how my team came together. Isabel really stepped up to the challenge of developing 3D model, and Liz handled the research and developing the voice of Twain. This project came with a lot of question marks in the beginning, and I’m proud to see how we were able to answer them one by one.