Hello everyone! 😎

I have been attending the carnival in my hometown for several years now, mainly for the colorful masks and the fun that unfolds there.
The carnival is an important cultural and ethnographic festival that dates back centuries, and its purpose is to chase away winter with various traditional characters.
Nowadays, it's a festive celebration for the crowds, audience, and performers.

I usually take a series of photos first, and this year I already posted them a few days ago.
@seckorama/carnival-one

Then I edit the short videos into a single one to capture the event's atmosphere. Let's say, Carnival Madness, is one such example.

Well, this year I took a step forward. But I still wonder if this is a step backward? I have to admit, I'm not entirely sure yet 🤔

So, I decided to try using AI tools to animate a few selected images and then put together a slightly longer piece, again with the main goal of capturing the carnival's atmosphere.
Whether I've captured that atmosphere, that carnival feeling, or not, is for those who see it to judge :)

Anyway, I've been following AI tools, especially for audio and image generation, for some time now. In fact, I'm learning to use them. Sometimes I'm fascinated by the results, but not always. I've been involved in video production for as long as I can remember, but I haven't worked with AI video tools. I tried a few things in NightCafe years ago, but I think those were just hallucinations, as they are popularly called when we get strange results that make no sense.
But in the last year, there has been tremendous progress in this area. In fact, I think we humans can no longer keep up with everything happening.

To avoid being too long-winded, I'm planning a longer treatise on all this for my next project. For now, just a brief explanation:
In the video, I first show a photo I took, followed by a short 10-second video generated by AI from the photo. 17 photos and short videos combined into 3 minutes. Of your time, if you want to :)

The photos were taken on a Pixel 7, animated in Grok Imagine 4.1 (well, as I write this, version 4.2 is already out), the background sound was created in Suno, and everything was edited in Adobe Premiere.

I didn't use any text prompts to generate the video. I could have corrected various artifacts, which would probably have been better, but I gave the AI complete freedom to recognize objects in the image and add some movement to them.

I must admit that I had a lot of fun doing all this, and I also learned something, which is the only thing that matters.
Comments are of course welcome :)

Thank you for your attention!