#fauxstalgia

[deepdreamnights]

Bio-Booster Armor Garfield: Extended Opener, 1989

In the late 80s, anime was hyper-violent, and licensing was out of control.

Based on this. Made with Vidu, with editing and supplemental animation by myself.

[melinoelabs]

KDMU After-Cool Adventure Block Promo (8-20-87)

A friend of mine at Buzby-Spurlock sent me a rare surviving KDMU bumper that was in an old box of materials sent in for approvals. I remember afternoons watching the Omnistation before mom and dad got home and made me change the channel because the monsters on ROM gave me nightmares.

Pretty sure I've still got my ScardeyHoot stuffed animal in mom's attic, but the tail got too loose to hold him up after a couple of years of me dragging him around by it.

Let me know if this brings back memories for any of you guys.

Humbert Outreach Liaison

[therobotmonster]

The Secret Origin of Mrs. Nautilus / "If The Goo's Alight, It's Not Alright!"

Originally printed in TyrannoMax #25, October 1977.

Updated from this, details under the fold.

I already have mostly-unmodded versions of the images on the first version, but even those involved minor color fixes and cleanup of major flaws.

For a full comic page, though, I wanted passable consistency. The original colors had to be removed and converted into "inks", those inks then modified to keep clothing, hair length, and other features relatively consistent, areas outside the frame have to be drawn in, the image recolored, and then given aging and halftoning.

Each pic used a different prompt around the basic format of:

Secretary with a bob-haircut, redhead, green blouse and pearls,(action),(emotion descriptors), comic panel by Jack Kirby and Alex Toth, 1968, in the style of 60s Marvel

a secretary with lavender skin, tentacles for hair, (action),(emotion descriptors) comic panel by jack kirby and alex toth, 1968, in the style of 60s marvel

[deepdreamnights]

TyrannoMax Trading Card & Sticker Album, Stikks™ Company, Inc. Selections from Set 1: Fear the Roar!

The Stikks Company was best known for making sports cards, but they branched out in the late 70s by getting the contract to make trading cards for Cocytus Comics' Nightmare Pit and Tomorrownauts titles (a mint Nightmare Pit series 1 Farrah Fyendlyne vs Glodie Redeemer (37) is $300+ on the secondary market, yow!).

This got their foot in the door for the 80s when the Cocytus / Buzby Spurlock Animation merger put the Cocytus characters on TV sets and toy shelves (semi)worldwide. Buzby-Spurlock needed merch liscenees and Stikks got most of the trading cards and sticker albums.

As with most things, Stikks was acquired by Hasbro in the 90s.

EXTENSIVE Process/Tutorial under the fold.

You were warned, listen to some jams while you read.

Visit Original Link

Visit Original Link

Visit Original Link

Vidu has been advancing their image generation options and wanted us in the Creative Partner Program to show it off. (click the link to try it with 100 free credits, etc).

But I'm rarely doing anything just on straight gens so these are heavy edits, so here's the procedural breakdown.

I used the new GPT-2 because it was part of the assignment, using the text-to-image to generate multiple flat white cardboard sheets with dents and creases at the corners, and plain aged cardstock. I set those aside.

Next came generating the card-images. One nice thing about the Vidu system is the references are more or less universal, so I could use my pre-existing TyrannoMax animation models as the base.

I prompted specifically for the characters to be rendered as acrylic paintings in a mid-80s trading-card art style, describing the scene, and then generating. In some cases taking those results and using them as the reference pic for another pass-through to diminish instances where things felt too animation-cel-like.

For things like the DinoHydra, which I didn't have animation models for, I used the same system to make them.

On the toy each head would be a launcher, except the T-rex that bites, and there's a removable battle saddle, obviously.

I'm going to do further development on the final animation/toy DinoHydra, but going with a rough draft for the licensed out stuff is very period accurate, so much like how I have 'high budget' and 'low budget' versions of some of my animation reference for period accuracy, I went with it.

Once I had the basic cards, it was off to Photoshop. First, the normal color correction, number-of-fingers-correction (dinoids have three fingers and a thumb, and while flubbing that is period accurate in animation, it wouldn't be on cards, so had to fix several hands /away/ from human anatomical accuracy).

These were then composited with the image frame I'd designed based on the one used in Dinosaurs/Mars Attacks. I picked the fonts to try and match the look of Topps' 80s output, to help make that fauxtalgia pop.

With edits in place, I then used Upscayl to make the images very large (about 5000x3000ish), because now comes the simulation of printing effects.

I'm going to start with a new image to show off this part of the process, as I didn't think to preserve the step-by-stop of any of the base cards in the first two posts (wasn't planning this detailed a tutorial at the time).

So lets go with Aunt Acid's character card.

Prompt: <reference> in the corroded remains of a suburban home. She extends one hand toward the POV, acid splashing from her open hand. 1985 science-fiction/fantasy acrylic painting, no text or branding, dynamic angle 1985 science-fiction/fantasy acrylic painting, no text or branding, the painting is in a sci-fi/fantasy pulp illustration style

On the left is the raw gen, on the right is after some selective color correction and the upscale to 5000ish px tall

I duplicate the layer in Photoshop, and I apply a 5px color halftone. This simulates /most/ of the printing process. However, real printed material of this type would have had black as a separate layer, and so the darkest areas of black wouldn't have any halftoning. Photoshop's filter does not do this.

So I duplicate the original layer again, and use Threshold to produce a B&W image that picks up the very darkest blacks only, and I set that to multiply Just color halftone on the left, color halftone with simulated spot-black on the right.

Combining that image with the card template I'd built before, and you get the image on the left, adding one of the cardstock images set to multiply, then flattening and doing some color-tweaking, gets the image on the right.

Her getup is a /titch/ anacronistic, since TyrannoMax is a 1985 series and her look is more Peg Bundy from Married With Children, but bouffants and cat-eye glasses have been just-slightly-unfashionable for most of modern history, so I'm cutting myself slack there.

<This is the part of the tutorial where I ramble about the OC for a bit>

Her whole schtick is that she got exposed to Dr. Underfang's primordial ooze (man that sounds dirty) while alive, and she survived the mutations, so she doesn't wind up geneincarnating into a beast-person but does gain super-powers and has her personality exaggerated to villainous levels. She and Cold Shoulder are similar in that regard.

I haven't decided whose Aunt Acid she is yet, because I'm not sure if its funnier if she's Dr. Underfang's, Cold Shoulder's, or Ms. Nice/Ms. Nautilus's. Now, she will refer to basically anyone younger than herself as if they were a beloved niece or nephew she hasn't seen in years, but she's legitimately related to one of the villain mains, and that's the one that threw her in the giant vat of glowing ooze.

Her super-power is pretty self explanatory: she constantly produces and can also shoot an acidic compound that varies between 2.5 ph and cartoonishly ultra-caustic, she also generates tear gas-like fumes that become hallucinogenic with extended exposure. Her powers are constantly active unless temporarily suppressed by exposure to a strong chemical base (or a whole, whole lot of baking soda).

Her motivation is she's having a midlife crisis and when she finds out that her niece/nephew is actually a villain goes "that sounds fun." Essentially, Aunt Acid's getting her groove back via supervillainy and TyrannoMax and pals are the unfortunate staff on her carnage-ful cruise.

[deepdreamnights]

Disclosure: I am in the Vidu artists program, pretty sure this is technically sponsored content. This is a fixed version of the original post.

Of course, it's another Fauxstalgia Fake-Em-Up from yours truly, this time demonstrating the beta-access potential of the new Vidu Q2 reference-to-video mode (get 100 free credits if you click here to try it out for free).

So, lets talk about how it was done (an overview)

GIFs are unedited wherever possible to show raw results.

The big problem with using AI for anything actually productive is inconsistency. While there's always wobble and bad gens, Vidu's reference-to-video option is the best solution I've seen thus far.

Essentially, you build a little profile with up to three reference pics and a basic prompt for your characters, props, etc. From then on out you can use the reference in your prompts to generate new scenes. It decreases confusion about what character is what, and it lets you establish styles of movement and other effects characters should always have going without having to use prompt-space in every scene.

As you can see with Tilly Tepesh's jacket and the ghost of her uncle Drac's translucency, and with the fact that I can have four different kinds of near-identical blokroid in the same scene without them morphing into each other or making weird hybrids.

Images can also be used with ref-to-video without making a full reference profile. For the various Drac-and-Tilly playing scenes the robot kept making filly play the back of the keyboard and spaced them to far apart, so I composited a demonstration image together to help guide the process.

Which helped a lot.

I used a variation on my typical asset-creation process on this (tutorials), utilizing a lot of early gens and ref-to-images in Vidu's system (tutorial) to bulk up the process, along with Midjourney, Sora, and Civit.

For the audio, I recorded the lines myself, then loaded them into Suno to modify my voice into something more announcer-like and bring the music in under it.

Visit Original Link

All the editing, compositing, logos, etc were done the old fashioned way.

Quality Improvements (also an overview)

Basics:

Up to 8 second gens.

4:3 and 3:4 aspect ratios (in addition to 1:1, 9:16 and 16:9)

General improvements to quality, coherence, and prompt understanding.

Extend clips multiple times up to 5 mins (launched after the video above was finished)

While I'll get into the details of the improvements to quality as well as a number of other new features (up to 8 second generations, clip extending, and sound (very early on that one)) in other posts, those who have followed TyrannoMax may remember the issue with boulders.

Well, after a lot of coaching and getting Max a new trailer, he's finally stopped screwing around on set.

In short, a lot of things that just weren't doable before now work, and the general quality of gens is higher and sharper than ever before.

What I was not expecting was for it to emulate Gerry Anderson-style puppetry well. Ironically, the kind of jank you get from pre-digital media is hard for AI to duplicate. If you want something to look polished, smooth, and modern, that's easy.

It did take a lot of prompting for non-moving faces/immobile dolls, and editing is always needed, but the differences between Q1 and Q2 is apparent when you compare the same prompt in both:

The deadly starmantis gingerly setting the Queen Seltza prop down is adorable, but not what the director called for.

All in all, it took me about a week to go from concept to video, mostly on the back of my needing to make base character, prop, and set assets for everything that wasn't TyrannoMax more or less from scratch. If you want to give it a try yourself, here's that link again, and I'm posting a bunch of tutorials, old and (hopefully) new this week.

And as always, like, comment and subscribe.

[deepdreamnights]

TyrannoMax and the Warriors of the Core, 1986, Buzby-Spurlock Animation

[deepdreamnights]

In 1989 teen monsterism was at an all time high.

A situation that was made substantially worse by the release of:

If the Goo's Alight, It's Not Alright!

Which introduced (advertently) the world to Goozy, the anti-goo mutant monster and (inadvertently) to the idea of drinking mysterious glowing liquids, which had not occurred to many people prior to the campaign.

Ultimately, four American cities were laid waste by the resulting "muteens", making it the most successful/least lethal PSA campaign of the 80s and 90s.

(Made, with Vidu's Q3 & Q2-Pro models, try it out free here + get 100 bonus credits, and I am in the Vidu Creative Partner Program.)

[deepdreamnights]

A little something for all you 00s kids who grew up shipping Audi and Hellhop.

-

Actually, this is the first of several videos I made to help showcase what Vidu's new Q2-Pro (this vid) and Q3 (upcoming ones) can do.

The short version?

I don't have an excuse not to make my shows anymore.

And chances are, you might find yourself in that same boat. Sign up for free with my code (ROBOTQ3) and get 100 bonus credits and give it a shot.

While I've had the Daem-On characters in my back pocket for awhile, and the song as well, the actual above video was about 36 hours from start to finish, with the usual manual video editing and manipulation mixed with Vidu's new ref-to-video model.

The big improvement with Q2-Pro is the ability to use videos of up to 8 seconds as reference prompts, which can be used to tighten up/fix problems with otherwise good gens, update vids made with older gens, and can be used as a reference for character and camera movement.

Beyond that, Q2-Pro gives a lot more coherence, as several of the Daemes simply would not work properly under previous models.

Detailed tutorials are, of course, to come.