At the #altc Scotland meeting in June, Joe Wilson used a video he created using the Lumen 5 service. It was a really nice addition to his presentation and I had a wee play with it, but didn’t really do much more. Earlier in the week , my colleague Marion Kelt mentioned that she had used it to create a post for the OEPS project so I went back and had another look. I also signed up for their beta automated video service, called “smare templates” and the other day I got an automagically created video based on one of my blog posts.
It was quite interesting to see what the algorithms selected from the post. They kind of got some the good bits, but missed a bit of the context. Maybe this is down to my own incoherence writing style. I suspect many of my posts are a bit illogical and I know am guilty of not proof reading enough. Mainly that’s because I want to get things published quickly.
I always think I should write a post, wait for a couple of hours then go back to it and edit. The reality is that I just want/ need to get things posted in a relatively confined time frame. As you know, dear reader, my blog is more a train of thought that a considered, scholarly work.
Looking at the text in the context of adding visuals to it, did make me think about what I had written a bit more. I didn’t write the post as a short video script or with visuals in mind, but selecting text for that purpose did make me edit a bit more, and wish that perhaps I had taken a bit more time on the original text.
I’m still in two minds about the service. On the one had I do think it is quite “neat”, and a good way to re-use content like a blog post. On the other, if i wanted to create a video post I would probably have a different starting point, message to convey. Whilst “smart templates” could save time is there the danger that they will just create a homogenized set of video resources? AI ftw – not! I quite like selecting my own images, text and music – you know actually using some of my digital capabilities. Which, ironically or possibly not, was the underlying theme of the post. The jury is still out in my head, but I will probably experiment a bit more with it.
Anyway here’s my edited version of the video based on this post from the other week.