Back to being "caught"

Don't consider this series of posts an obsession. Just because you haven't seen it documented here on HIVE before, know this: it is something that has plagued my thoughts since I first heard the song. I committed a combination of attempts into this, using both MidJourney and Stable Diffusion.

It's the hardest thing I've ever had to do
To try and keep from calling you

Here are some of the attempts from Stable Diffusion, with about 50 iterations...

a beautiful brown haired woman in a london flat sitting by the telephone table she is sad at golden hour sparse furniture

And then the same from MidJourney, with its unique style

I'm already going through far too many iterations for this without a result, but I am visually interested in all the results. As I type this, I have Stable Diffusion iterating through some more images in the hopes that I can get something more visceral, upping the number of iterations with the sampler dialled up to obtain a more photorealistic example.

If the goal is to illustrate the whole song, I've certainly got my work cut out for me, as this is simply two lines.

There's an interesting feature in each of these images though, well, at the very least in some of them - do you know what it is?

There's an empty chair in some of the compositions. That is an illustration of the emptiness that this woman must feel.

Therefore, I think I have a new prompt.

a beautiful brown haired woman sits in a london flat across from an empty chair with an old style telephone on a table with two tea cups between the chairs she is sad at golden hour

I want variations of each 1, 2 and 3 here. They all have potential.

The final variations seem to be the most impactful, but I want it to be more realistic, so I will again modify my prompt to chase down some documentary photography influence.

an award winning documentary photograph a beautiful brown haired woman sits in a london flat across from an empty chair with an old style telephone on a table with two tea cups between the chairs she is sad at golden hour --ar 16:9 --testp

I think Stable Diffusion is winning at this point, even though it is generating some bizzare faces and hands

a beautiful sad brown haired woman sits in a london flat at a table. the table has an old style rotary telephone and two cu 1810314893.png

a beautiful sad brown haired woman sits in a london flat at a table. the table has an old style rotary te 815970068.png

It is doing a far better job at the context of "sad", but neither is getting the message about the phone at the table. Perhaps if I put the phone on the wall, or go super abstract and ask for a model of a phone booth on the table?

I won't do that. I will adjust the prompt again...

HELLO, NUMBER THREE.

The enhanced version from MidJourney is still pretty rough, so I've taken it into Stable Diffusion to have a further play with many more iterations to push it into a photographic realm.

It is much the same, so the prompt needs to be adjusted to get the result I want out of Stable Diffusion. I ran a whole bunch of iterations and didn't get anything close to this, so I went back to MidJourney in order to generated further iterations.

There's some interesting compositions here, but not quite as coherent as what came out of Mid Journey. I will keep on iterating to see what other results I can get.

The idea is morphing conceptually, now. Instead of there being the emptiness and disharmony of two cups of tea, and a single woman, with an empty chair, and a phone in the middle... it morphs back to the piece I created some time ago about a woman mourning her self.

What if this time, she's talking to her ghost?

I'm overwhelmed and confronted by all the images I am able to produce at such a rapid rate. All of them have so much detail, context, symbolism and hidden details spattered with meaning like paint on a palette.

Yet still, none of them are bringing me the creative "aha" moment that I am after. It is certainly getting closer, however. This image is within me, but I don't think it is yet ready to emerge into the world without further and more coaxing, thought and iteration.