I wondered about the ethics of working with Bob, so I looked up a list of public domain movies and saw that Suddenly, the old Frank Sinatra assassination classic, was on the list. I downloaded it and skimmed through looking for Sinatra monologues, or anyone’s for that matter. There were a few clips that might be useable, with a little editing. I picked one, then needed something for him to say. I asked Dr. Oblivion how he might warn people about the conglomerate Aggressive Technologies and downloaded his response. I ran it through the Converter App to get a text file, with I fed to ElevenLabs after giving them a sample of Frank’s voice. I ran into some hiccups with the lip syncing script this time. It got hung up on the MP3 upload section and failed 2 or 3 times because something couldn’t connect, but I kept trying and eventually it worked. Then when the video was done, I discovered that the audio was longer than the video, which made the video loop back to the beginning and ruined the effect. I went back to the MP3 file and used Audacity to close up the many pauses. I like the walking towards the camera and talking effect and think it would work well with the right lines, so this works as a proof-of-concept. The key is to have less than 25 seconds of audio so it doesn’t loop. Unless you want it to.
I find it interesting that what he says sounds like something Dr. Oblivion would say, but it doesn’t have the same effect in Frank’s voice.
If anyone wants to puppeteer Frank, you can download the frank.mp4 and use it instead of the train.mp4 with the Wav2lip script.
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