Magic Mirror

Once Again...

Republished from the Duke University Digital Media Community Blog

We saw in our last blog that I couldn’t get it to make the physics work something that should have been a staple for horror films. I wanted to see if I could just quickly do this the “old fashioned” way of using compositing.

I tried again but at this point, I think Flow is done. As I mentioned before that Google Flow changed an interface in the middle of a day and has not ever really worked since. This is a lab product and there’s no support so whatevers.

I ended up using Seedance 2.0 using the Veo 3.1 engine. This is strange that I used the same prompt and same reference image and it gave no policy issue - so it appears some sort of bug in Flow.

Here’s the initial video:

I then wanted to change the prompt to make the person become transformed. I was going to use the entire frame, but would only the reflection in the final composite. My initial prompt change, just changing face action of the actor did not stabilize the camera. It was important that both shots had to match for both cameras. I changed the prompt to direct it not to change the camera, but it did not heed that request. I switched to using the first video as the reference video and added the original image. That worked the best, but was not perfect. It should have matched, especially since both were used (modified prompt and reference video).

I did some animation in the mask (because I’m a nerd) and did some color change. Here’s the composite:

Was disappointed but will need to try different engines and prompting to try to better lock the camera shot to shot.