Sometimes I talk myself out of doing something before trying.  A bit of writing. Or something else creative.

I’m talking myself out of doing it because I’m trying to save effort. 

Why do something if it isn’t going to work, right?

Maybe.  Maybe not.

Other times, I do it and see if it works.

Last year, I decided to make a video for my choir’s upcoming concert.  I used AI.  I thought it might be cute to take a picture of the choir and see if it could animate it with the sound of some of our songs.

But I also thought that some people might not be comfortable with it.  Should I ask first?  Or should I play around and see what I can do?

I decided to play around.  I took a photo of the choir and had it “cartoonized” so that it wasn’t really people’s actual images.  And then I used AI to animate that cartoon version.  I used excerpts from our singing as the soundtrack.  It was a bit clunky, but I thought it was cute.

Then, I posted the finished version in our group chat and asked if anyone had concerns.  A few people did. 

Some were against AI in general.  Which I wasn’t going to address.  AI is here and used everywhere.  It’s like being against social media.  You can choose not to use it, but that isn’t going to make it go away.

Some didn’t want their image uploaded to AI in any form.  I could understand that.

I didn’t upload the video. I deleted it.

But I still wanted to make a video for the choir.  What if I took the idea of animating a still image, but used a different image?  The poster for our show had figures in silhouette.  I could animate those and still use the soundtrack of our singing. 

The second attempt was still a little clunky.  AI kept changing stuff a bit.  Editing it was time-consuming.

But the second version was better than my first attempt.  I posted it. 

Lots of folks in the choir shared it.  And in the end, it had about 500 views!

The day before the concert, I decided to try another video.  It was of me changing into my concert costume using special effects.  Simple but fun.  Again, it took quite a while to edit. 

In the end, I had made a mistake in filming it which I couldn’t fix in the edit.  I’d have to reshoot it if I wanted to share it. 

Even though I had already spent a couple of hours on the video, I decided against working on it anymore.  I had learned a lot from playing around. 

The effort wasn’t lost even if it didn’t result in something shareable. 

If you’re going to learn something that is going to make you better, then it’s better to do it.  Even if it doesn’t get seen by anyone else.  Creativity is a muscle that needs to be used and strengthened.

We learn by doing. It doesn’t matter who gets to see the final product.