What is Time? AI Conceptual Animation
Kiki Wu
The Concept of Time
What is time?
It originates from something tangible and physical, such as clocks and hourglasses, which measure the passage of time. The physical presence and visual representation of time can give us a sense of stability in our lives, as we can rely on them to determine where we are in the day and what needs to be done. However, they can also evoke a sense of anxiety as we witness the constant movement of the hour hands, flickering “:” on digital clocks, reminding us of the fleeting nature of time. We find solace in the fact that we can glance at our watches or the screens of our smartphones, which act as anchors in our awareness of time. Yet, we also experience a sense of astonishment or regret when we realize “Oh, is it already 7 pm?“
“Is it truly the late month of May in 2023 already?”
It sometimes feels as if time is beyond our control, governed by some higher power whose agents are those cold machines and devices that flip sands in the small hourglass or move the hour and minute hands.
But does this external force truly represent the essence of time?
To me, time is akin to a labyrinth, an intricate maze that intertwines the past, the future, and the present within the depths of our minds. You might feel you are still finding the way out and don’t know where is the exit, but when you look at it from a higher perspective, you already see the entire structure of the maze.
I strive to perceive time through a non-linear lens.
If you have ever worked with editing software, such as Premiere Pro, you are likely familiar with rearranging and trimming clips on a timeline. We remove unnecessary segments to craft a coherent narrative, and we may relocate a particular clip to the beginning to create a captivating opening.
Perhaps, the relationship between time and our lives can be likened to this process. Those clips are already there, but we rearrange them as the past, present, and future.
Possible prompts: Clock, maze, computer produce/control time, timer, time machine, giant hourglass, fluid chaos, goddess of time, pixelated, glitchy, illusionary, bird’s eye view, higher perspective.
Process
To create this AI animation presenting the concept of time, I use Stable Diffusion and Deforum.
👉 How to installing Deforum and make AI animation.
- Start prompting, prompting, prompting……. and finding the best image for the first keyframe of the animation. In this case, I opt for an image depicting a goddess holding a clock as the starting point.
- Decide how the image should evolve at specific keyframes and proceed with generating prompts for those particular frames.
- Input those prompts to Deforum, and hit generate!
Prompts and Other Settings
Important: Please follow this JSON format to set up the prompts, the number means the keyframes.
{
"0": "A pretty goddess wearing a silver dress with black shining long floating hair is holding a giant (elegant clock:1.25), close-up, upper body, symmetrical Vogue portrait, solo",
"50": "a giant hourglass surrounded by misty floating fluid colorful clouds, gradient purple galaxies",
"100": "a giant computer surrounded by misty floating fluid colorful clouds, gradient purple galaxies",
"150": "a giant quantum computer:1.5 explodes misty floating fluid colorful clouds and (pixelated chips:1.2)",
"200": "a giant of labyrinth maze, misty floating fluid colorful clouds and (pixelated glitchy chips:1.15), (bird's eye view:1.1)",
"250": "a labyrinth maze to infinity, misty floating fluid colorful clouds and (pixelated glitchy chips:1.15), (bird's eye view:1.1)",
"300": "a 3D matrix environment, misty floating fluid colorful clouds and (pixelated glitchy grids:1.2), (bird's eye view:1.1)",
"350": "a 3D matrix environment, misty floating fluid colorful clouds, spiral fluids"
}
- Positive Prompt: 60s psychedelic art, overlapping dripping colors, multi-layered, high quality, high contrast, ayahuasca art, Behance HD:1.1, art station
- Negative Prompt: EasyNegative, bad anatomy, low resolution, low quality, watermark, bad face, bad hands, nude, big breast, bad feet, bad legs
- Stable Diffusion checkpoint: lyriel_v15
- Sampling Step: 20
- Seed: 1275635980
- CFG Scale: 7
- Sampling Method: Euler A
- Aspect Ratio: 720 x 1280 px
