The Inheritance

A MOTE Prompt Response

And now, for something completely different.

I was intending to write a story from this prompt, gifted to me at random by

Parrish Baker

. “He inherited his grandmother’s house and, apparently, her unfinished business with the devil.”

Only I got sidetracked, doing some fun little graphics to give myself a mood and layout ideas for the cottage the young man inherited. Then I thought “I wonder if…” and you know, it was possible to animate him in walking up to the house. Suddenly I found myself deep in a wee keyframe animation project. And of course I had to write the story to fit the moving picture. And don’t forget rendering up a soundtrack.

I kind of love how it turned out. Sure, there are major limitations on the engines which render these things. I think there always will be. That’s not the point. The point is, I was able to play and create, and come up with this!

I started out by ginning up images to represent different rooms or parts of the tiny cottage I envisioned built onto the remains of a long-gone castle. Only the tower still stood, looking out over the ocean below the cliff the castle had once dominated.

I looked at the image after I’d weeded out the ones that didn’t resonate with me. This was cute. This had possibilities! I zoomed out a little, and asked for an animation of the young man arriving, then extended that. I created visions of the other parts of the cottage, envisioning it as a single open room, an added-on lean-to kitchen, a bedroom way up in the spire of the tower…

The greatroom as I first pictured it, not as I wound up animating it. In this, you’ll note as he approached the cottage there’s a window. This image doesn’t show a window, but a door into another room. Which might be where the bathroom is?

The tower end of the cottage, with the tower visible through the high window. There’s a bit of a loft so you could clean that window and maybe have more books up. The kitchen door is barely visible to the far left.

Teeny tiny little kitchen! I think this is all there is to it.

As I was doing all of this, I could just hear my Mom in my head trying to make the layouts work! I did think about pulling out some graph paper and sketching it, Mom. The trouble is, that you can’t show MidJourney a blueprint, and expect it to orient itself and then be consistent. Far beyond the ability of the machine. However, it’s really fun to see what a concept can look like with a few hours of work, and to think about where human animators could take it from here - because only a human can get the transitions and consistency right. Yet. Maybe later I’ll be able to do more of this without having to spend hundreds of hours I don’t have drawing every frame to key off of (and thousands of hours, were I to have to draw every frame).

There’s no chimney in the tower, so when Midj had the character pull a curtain over the bed, I knew what was going on! Beds used to use curtains to insulate the sleeper and keep them cozy even if the bedroom was frigid enough to freeze the water in the washbasin. It was an artifact of the animation and a flaw… until I decided it wasn’t.

It took far longer than I thought it should to get an image showing the angle of the view down the stairs I wanted. That’s the thing with these tools - they are great, but you really have to know how to tell it what you want - and they have serious limits. Still, I finally got what I wanted, and then some, as it implies a far deeper cellar than the exterior of the cottage and tower implies. Which was a fun idea to play out the story of the unfinished business with the devil, by having the grandson walk down all those stairs.

The final scene was a mysterious room deep in the cliff, with a comfortable fire and chairs arranged for a chess game. I decided the chimney for that hearth must vent out the side of the cliff, far enough below the cottage that it doesn’t just blow back in the windows. And I decided that the grandson can refuse to be enticed the way a lonely old woman must have been. Her debts died with her, and he does not inherit them — whatever they may have been.

By keying short five-second animations with detailed prompts off the original images I’d made up for setting the scene, I was able to create a fairly nifty little story sequence. It is very short, of course. Even that took me… about three hours to make less than ninety seconds of video? And of course I was doing the music with Suno. The first thing I asked it to do was sort of blah. Wrong for the story. Back to the drawing board, I literally told it what I wanted “creepy cozy cottage with a spire tower built on the ruins of an ancient castle” and voila! Got a really nice atmospheric song for the animation.

At this point I started to pull all the elements into InShot, the app I use for editing short videos. By using a still image, the short animations, and text overlays, I was able to make this come together in telling a flash fiction, or nano fiction, story. If I had written it out, there would have been many more words describing the setting which were not necessary by doing it this way. On the other hand, there’s no real room for building emotional connection to the character, you’re never really ‘in his head’ and had I written it, I’d have been able to fill in the memories of his gran in a way this lacks entirely. Funny how the same story can have so many facets depending on how you choose to tell it!

I don’t know that I’ll do this again. Perhaps. It will never take the place of my writing, I can do so much more with the written word. Still, it’s exciting to play with the tools and see what I can create with them. It’s fun to think about the future as the tools are more powerful. To see what all kinds of people can make with them, people with a lot more skill than I!