Pizzini for February: The Unheard Promise

This year long project is a collaboration between filmmaker Midi Onodera and myself. Midi describes the project and February video here:

Pizzini is the plural of Pizzino which is derived from the Sicilian language and means “small piece of paper”. Most notably pizzini were used by the Sicilian mafia to communicate instructions or messages from the boss to his gang. In mid-2023, Matteo Messina Denaro who is described as “the last godfather of the Sicilian mafia” was arrested after pizzini were found in the leg of a chair in his sister, Rosalia Messina Denaro’s home.

The earliest signs of written notations can be dated back to 35000 BCE (Before Common Era). Fast forward to 2024 CE (Common Era) and Deloitte predicts that almost all software companies will integrate Generative AI into the offerings. The GenAI market will reach over 50 billion US dollars.

The contrast between the hand-written word and text generation is prodigious and we exist somewhere between the two. This year’s series will focus on the pizzini of our time. Collaborating with poet, Ronna Bloom, we will create six videos over the year based on pizzini. Little notes “found” in unusual places. Every other month, we will use a consumer AI program to create a video based on the same parameters as our original video.

Which video will catch your eye? Will GenAI videos replace those hand-made by humans? You be the judge. Human-made videos will appear in January, March, May, July, September, and November. GenAI videos will be posted in February, April, June, August, October, and December.

FEB: The Unheard Promise
For this month’s video I used the free program Invideo.
I entered this into the video generator: “I want a 1 minute experimental video using the text ‘I promise you I didn’t do it’. Use a dark, atonal soundtrack and frame everything in a polaroid frame.”
I wanted to see how close the AI could get to producing a video like January’s project, “Sunday at 10:11 am”. Since this series will only use free programs, the ability to customize the elements is limited. I am also interested in seeing what the AI programs will create with minimal human intervention. This is the result.