So I wanted to play with the idea of Aggressive Technologies a little. I came up with a logo, using a font from Da Font and a silhouette of a war hammer. I should have noted which font I used, but… I thought the silhouette worked well. The angle and shapes suggest aggression, with a hint of rocket, and the font is similarly aggressive.

I asked Dr. Oblivion, “If a corporation called Aggressive Technologies were to promote its AI-based security and surveillance services to law enforcement agencies, how would they go about it?” and he responded with attitude.

Then I started playing with the animation script. What would happen if I uploaded something other than the train.mp4 video? I not-very-quickly found out that there is a strict 60 second limit for the video length. I trimmed a Bob Ross video to an appropriate length, and ended up giving him a lip-synced Oblivion voice. That was kind of weird, but not good enough.

I decided to play with ElevenLabs. I bit the bullet and paid them a dollar so I could clone a voice. This was ethically questionable, but like the Folk-RNN project, the questions occurred to me afterwards. In the meantime, I fed my cloned voice some text from The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, and this gave me some ideas.

I imported my logo and my Bob clip into iMovie. I dropped the logo on Bob’s canvas and used the picture-in-picture setting to superimpose it. I had to adjust the size and position a little. It didn’t look right though, because the white background of the logo didn’t match the white of the canvas. So I imported the logo into Photopea, dropped out the background and exported it as a PNG file, which would preserve the transparency. Then I imported that into iMovie and it looked much better on the canvas. Originally I was just going to use it on the canvas close-up, but since the camera was stationary I could put it on the canvas in the rest of the video. I saved the video as aggrobob.mp4 and used it instead of the train.mp4 in the lip-syncing script, along with my cloned-voice file of the Manifesto excerpt. Interestingly, the script tried to lip sync the logo when Bob was off screen.

So I was getting somewhere. I brought my new video into iMovie, and dropped a piece of the old one over it to mask the canvas close-up lip-syncing. Dr. Oblivion had said something about celebrity endorsements, so I imported that video as well and inserted it in front of the other video. I put an mp3 of some ominous music underneath the Bob section. There’s a line through the middle of the sound tracks in iMovie that you can use to adjust volume. I boosted Bob to 224% and dropped the music to 6%, and saved the whole thing as an MP4, then uploaded to Youtube.

So it’s something, more of a learning experience than a planned project. Is it something that can be used as part of the Aggressive Technologies backstory? People can make of it what they will.