The 14th Earl
Bringing the past to life: AI Video Production for History & Education: Benefits & Workflow
The Goal
The goal was to create a trailer for a documentary about a real man who was born more than 200 years ago, and achieved a huge amount during his time on the planet. The man was Edward Stanley, the 14th Earl of Derby, a man who was 3 times British PM, helped abolish slavery, and was the longest serving leader of the conservative party. Given the subject matter and the period in history that I was asked to represent, AI was by far the best way to go.
The Process
The first part of the project involved a lot of research and collating of reference materials. Because of the time period involved, there was almost no photographic references at all. Everything was either an oil painting or sketch. That meant that finding the model that was going to give me the photorealistic output that I was after took a little bit of experimentation. I eventually settled on Flux Kontext for the first stage of the project, turning oil paintings into photorealistic representations the characters.
After all the characters had been realised in their true form, I turned to the locations. Back in the early 19th century, all the landmarks looked very different than they do in modern times. It was important to achieve that 19th century look, particularly the waterfront of the River Mersey in Liverpool.
Once the locations had been created, the next step was to populate them. Some scenes were quite challenging, particularly the wider shots of the House of Commons. The biggest problem was trying to get generations that had natural movement in the crowd. After a number of generations I managed to get a couple of shots that I found acceptable.
The models I used were Flux Kontext, Nano Banana, Reve, Magnific, Kling and VEO. Editing and grade were don in Davinci Resolve.
The Takeaway
This was a challenging brief in many ways. There was the requirement to keep buildings and locations as historically accurate as possible, particularly when it came to Knowsley Hall. Also, the client, the Countess of Derby, had requested for as close a resemblance as possible, to way the characters are portrayed in their portraits. This meant trying a number of different models and prompting techniques before settling on the one that gave the best results, Flux Kontext.
For the first part of the project, I used Flora. Flora is an aggregator of models so it enables quick and easy testing of multiple models at the same time. When starting such a large project with so many shots, fast efficient workflows are vital.
AI models and workflows are evolving rapidly and improving constantly. Working on a project such as this can sometimes mean starting out with one workflow in mind but working a different way by the time you’re getting to the finish. Every day is a school day, is a saying that fits perfectly in the world of generative AI.
The 14th Earl as a young man, designed in AI to show consistency in the facial design
The 14th Earl of Derby created using my custom AI workflow, depicted in his later political career as Prime Minister to Queen Victoria
