“Ah, the poetic wonders of destruction and turmoil”

Botmaster Michael Branson Smith mentioned the AI Rap Battle Generator the other week, and after playing with the Wav2Lip script a bit, I had the thought, “What if Dr. Oblivion battled Bob Ross?” And thus we have the rap battle no one wanted to hear:

I had previously done some ElevenLabs experiments with Bob Ross and Max Headroom, and managed to lip sync some clips, so I had an inkling of how this might come together. I went to the Rap Battle Generator and had it produce the words. Getting the doctor to recite them was challenging though. The first time, I asked nicely and he complied, but I only gave him two verses because I was concerned he might choke on too much text. Then I gave him the third verse and he declined. I ended up trying 7 or 8 times. One time I asked him to read rather than recite, and he gave me a critique.

At one point he gave me a creative reinterpretation of the third verse, so I ended up using that. But most times he declined, politely or otherwise. It seemed like the more I asked, the more terse he was. Here’s a polite rejection:

For the Bob parts, I put the text into ElevenLabs, so that was easy. I wrote the Max Headroom intro and the in-between bits. I wanted to get him to say “The Bob!” and drag out the “o” so my text input was the, Baaaaaaaaaaaab! It didn’t come out quite how I wanted, but it had the freakish Headroom effect, so I ran with it. I put all the sound clips through the Wav2Lip script with appropriate video, and had the pieces I needed.

Then I had to find a backing beat. I googled open source beats and found several sites offering royalty-free tracks, but “royalty-free” doesn’t actually translate to “free.” The Free Music Archive worked though, so I grabbed a couple tracks and went with Coalescence. (need to remember to add that credit to the video).

To put it all together, I brought the sound and video clips into iMovie. I split the video parts up and arranged them in proper order. I decided to keep some of Dr. Oblivion’s unasked-for commentary at the beginning and end. I put the backing track underneath and lined it up so the beats kick in right around the point the doctor starts his rhymes. I thought I would have to fool around trying to get the voices to line up with the beats, but it seemed to work out more-or-less okay. One more track for the Dr. Oblivion’s Greatest Hits compilation!