#corny concerto

A Corny Concerto

Commission for aoi-watarimono, who wanted me to draw Bugs from A Corny Concerto in his tutu in my style. So I did. :3

The second rough draft and the current progress on Tales from the Vienna Woods: Cinemascope Edition!  I have almost every shot expanded to 2.35:1 aspect ratio, except for:

The first two shots following the title card, since those are going to be complicated.

The animated half of the shot where Bugs closes the book on the Dog’s nose

The shot where Porky reveals the bra under Bugs’ hands.  I’ve expanded the left side of the early part of the shot, but once it animates the whole shot returns to 1.33:1.

Wow! My favorite Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies cartoon turns 74 this year. I really enjoy the first segment immensely. XD

I’ve really not posted much of it here, but for the last few weeks I’ve had access to the DALL-E 2 Text to Image AI and have been playing around making various pictures.  One of the first ideas I had, although I didn’t start experimenting until more recently, was in uncropping films - taking movies that were originally filmed in Academy Ratio (4:3) and expanding them to 16:9 or Cinemascope (21:9).

Here’s some of my experimental results:

ORIGINAL ACADEMY RATIO FRAME FROM RODAN (1956):

AI GENERATED CINEMASCOPE FRAME:

ORIGINAL ACADEMY RATIO FRAME FROM RODAN (1956): 

AI GENERATED CINEMASCOPE FRAME: 

ORIGINAL ACADEMY RATIO FRAME FROM A WILD HARE (1940):

AI GENERATED CINEMASCOPE FRAME: 

ORIGINAL ACADEMY RATIO FRAME FROM A WILD HARE (1940): 

AI GENERATED CINEMASCOPE FRAME: 

As you can see, there’s some INCREDIBLE potential here for using DALL-E 2 and future Imagery AI to expand the frame of content originally produced in 4:3 Aspect Ratio.

Now, there’s a whole other conversation to be had about whether or not this SHOULD be done - Aspect Ratio is a major element of filmmaking, and films are produced with their specific aspect ratio in mind, but on the other hand this seems like it could serve as great alternative to pillarboxing older TV shows like Bonanza or The X-Files which were intended to fill the whole screen but today are pillarboxed because modern TVs have a wider aspect ratio.

So, my ambitious idea:  I want to take an old Bugs Bunny cartoon and, using DALL-E 2, expand the WHOLE CARTOON to Cinemascope as a demonstration of the concept.  I’m aiming at A Tale of Vienna Woods, a segment from A Corny Concerto (1943) - partly because it’s one of my all-time favorite ‘toons, but also because it’s SHORT.  It’s only the first half of the cartoon and runs less than three minutes which, IMO, makes it an ideal test case.  The hardest part I imagine dealing with is that the cartoon has some tracking shots and I’m not QUITE sure how to handle that.  But the stuff that’s still frames?  I think it can be done!

Been meaning to post this for most of a week!  This is the rough draft of Tales from the Vienna Woods: Cinemascope Edition.  Still lots of work to be done, but I’m pretty happy with how it’s turning out so far!

Been working at this for the last few hours and I'm pretty happy with some of the results so far!  Depending on how far I get I might try exporting a version for people to watch.   It's far from perfect - in most shots the seams between the original footage and the AI-Generated elements are clearly visible (I didn't account for jitter and grain - d'oh!), but overall I think the experiment is proving successful so far!

I've started to look at the frames that will need individual attention and AI generation to account for elements that aren't visible in the Academy Ratio but would be visible in the Cinemascope Ratio, and my eyes went a little cross-eyed at how many DALL-E 2 generations I'll need to burn through to do it (for the final shot I counted 90 FRAMES - there's a daily limit of 50 generations!)  So while I may get the broad strokes completed relatively quick the nitty-gritty may take a while.  xD

Some frame grabs from the timeline: