Reimagining La Jetée with Dall.E 3
The French time travel sci-fi classic presents an interesting way for experimenting with Dall.E 3 as a storyboarding tool
Text-to-image tools are increasingly commonplace and powerful, raising a whole host of questions of how they might be used in the media and creative industries.
Dall.E 3 is a particularly interesting product as it is hosted within the ChatGPT-plus environment. The ability to use the text-to-image model via a chat interface makes it much easier to use, in my view. I can write relatively simple instructions in natural language, and the LLM (GPT-4) will “translate” that request into more detailed prompts for the text-to-image model. This saves me the hassle of writing highly complicated instructions, as is common on some platforms like Midjourney.
Since its launch, Dall.E 3 has been used to generate comic strips and cool graphics. I decided to try Dall.E 3 on a slightly more complicated task, and see if it could be used to storyboard a short film.
The French sci-fi classic, La Jetée, came to mind right away as it is mostly told in black-and-white photographs. My goal was not to try to re-create director Chris Marker’s still images photograph-for-photograph, but to see if and how Dall.E 3 might help someone who wants to remake the La Jetée come up with a different visual style for the time-travel film.
Hence I opted to generate a series of line-art images with a steam-punk twist, so as to differentiate this experiment from Marker’s originals. The accompanying text for the images were translated from La Jetée’s original French script using GPT-4, and edited for clarity.
Clips of La Jetée can be easily found online, if you have not watched it before and want to compare it to the images below. I won’t link to those clips, for obvious copyright reasons.
La Jetée — Reimagined by Dall.E 3
This is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood.
The scene that disturbed him with its violence, and whose meaning he would only understand much later, took place on the main jetty at Orly, the Paris airport, a few years before the start of the Third World War.
On Sundays, parents take their children to see the departing planes at Orly.
On this particular Sunday, the child whose story we are telling would long remember the frozen sun, and the scenery at the end of the jetty.
And a woman’s face.
Nothing distinguishes memories from other moments; it’s only later that they make themselves known, by their scars.
This face was to be the only image from the time of peace to endure through the time of war. He wondered for a long time whether he had really seen it, or whether he had created this moment of sweetness to support the moment of madness that was to come.
With that sudden roar, the woman’s gesture.
The falling body, the cries of the people on the jetty, muffled by fear.
Later, he understood that he had witnessed the death of a man.
And some time after that, came the destruction of Paris.
Many died. Some thought they were victors.
Others were prisoners.
The survivors settled beneath Chaillot, in a network of underground tunnels.
The surface of Paris, and probably most of the world, was uninhabitable, rotten with radioactivity.
The victors kept watch over an empire of rats.
The prisoners were subjected to experiments that seemed to greatly concern those who carried them out.
At the end of the experiments, some were disappointed.
Others died.
Or went insane.
One day, they came to select a new test subject from among the prisoners.
He is the man whose story we are telling. He is afraid. He has heard about the Head of the Experiments. He thought he would find himself face to face with the Mad Scientist, with Dr. Frankenstein.
Instead, he met a reasonable man who calmly explained to him that the human race was doomed.
Space was off-limits. The only hope for survival lay in Time.
A hole in Time, and perhaps through it one could send food, medicine, energy sources. Such was the goal of the experiments: To project emissaries into Time, to call on the Past and the Future to aid the Present.
But the human mind stumbled. Waking up in another time was like being born a second time, as an adult. The shock was too strong.
After having thus projected lifeless or unconscious bodies into different zones of Time, the scientists were now focusing on subjects with very strong mental images. Capable of imagining or dreaming another time, they might be able to reintegrate into it.
The camp’s police monitored even dreams. This man was chosen among thousands, for his fixation on an image from the past.
At the beginning (of the experiment), nothing else but stripping out the present, and its torture devices.
They start again. The subject does not die, does not go mad.
He suffers.
They continue.
On the tenth day of the experiment, images begin to emerge, like confessions.
To be continued….?
Quick Thoughts
To be clear, I’m not a storyboard artist, not have I done this previously. This is nothing more than a fun experiment with Dall.E 3. But the images look stunning to me, and the process of generating and editing them was an addictive one, I have to say.
Some problems I encountered along the way:
- Maintaining a consistent style. The Dall.E 3 images here don’t deviate too wildly in quality, but quite clear the style from image to image is slightly different. Would be nice if there’s a way to “lock” on to a particular style for consistency.
- Getting Dall.E 3 to generate images with very specific instructions on where and how a person is positioned in the frame. Maybe my instructions weren’t clear enough.
In my view, these are minor issues in the big scheme of things. The combination of Dall.E 3 and GPT-4 has arguably resulted in the most useful sketchpad I’ve ever used.
