TwainTV: bringing mark twain to the 21st century
Creative Director, Project Manager, Designer
The Eternal Minds project brings great thinkers back to life through AI. This is a research driven project, exploring new technologies and workflows to bring an interactive representation of Mark Twain to life. TwainTV allows people to navigate the 21st century American experience with Mark Twain’s insights and witty humor through the medium of a podcast.
*Some of the images in this project were generated using AI
Role
Creative Director, Project Manager, Designer
Timeline
4 Weeks
Tools
Convai, Unreal, Figma, Photoshop, AfterEffects, Microsoft Co-Pilot, ChatGPT
For
The Director’s Bureau
With
Isabel Fleck– Creative Technologist, Developer | Elizabeth Wang– Designer, Developer
Overview
Bringing the past to the present
AI’s around us today are presented as a chatbot we can talk to. That is fine, but for us when we were asked to do this project we recognized that if we were going to go through all this effort of bringing Mark Twain to life, then we wanted the way we interacted with him to be more thoughtful than a chatbot.
The context of this project was particularly intriguing to us– what does it mean to bring someone from a different generation to our society today? With this project we wanted to explore the dynamic between Mark Twain and the 21st century– not just how people today would react to Twain, but also how Twain would react to contemporary society. Given Twain’s wit, humor, and life experiences we thought Twain would be a successful Podcaster today.
My Role
Combining technology and storytelling
My background in both design and technology meant that I have a better overarching idea of how things could be combined, but more importantly I knew how to present the idea. Part of my role was then to build the assets around Mark Twain to make this application of AI Twain more believable.
This project was something that none of us in the team have remotely tried to do, which made understanding the timeline and capabilities of the final a lot more difficult to understand. We worked closely within the team to figure out the best fidelity for our project given the short amount of time we had.
Come listen to Mark Twain’s hot takes on modern topics ranging from political debates, to interviews, and the art of storytelling.
How to engage the 21st century audience
Research
The brief of this project wanted us to create an interactive representation of Mark Twain. In order to do so we first needed to understand Mark Twain’s background– his personality, his life experiences, and his beliefs. However, if we were to create this interactive representation of Marl Twain we were more curious about two more things: Mark Twain’s salience in the 21st century, and how people would want to meaningfully engage with him today.
Concept
New modes of communication
From here we were started thinking about the famous people we know today. Actors, singers, and the relatively new celebrity– the influencer. We knew given Twain is still a digital manifestation he wouldn’t be able to attend red carpet events like other celebrities. However, it felt like it would be betraying who he is to turn him into an Instagram influencer. Eventually we came to the idea– podcasting.
This would allow Twain to stay as a digital manifestation. There’s more flaws when it comes to current technology and how well we can animate a person moving, however, it seems a little more forgiving when it comes to voices.
What actually took the longest
What we were doing for this project was completely new, which meant we had to go and figure out our own workflow and experiment a lot with new technologies. There was a lot of googling involved, and I’m now signed up for so many free trials of different AI products.
Diverse experiences
From our initial research we found Mark Twain had a really interesting life. However, along with that research what we found that Mark twain has been slowing fading out of relevance from our society today. For us this meant finding a new avenue to engage the audience. The question then became– how might we re-engage the 21st century audience with Mark Twain?
Execution Research
Background
Audience
Targeting a younger audience
We felt with the younger generation (18-35 years old) they’ve spent less time engaging with Mark Twain’s works, therefore we had a way to re-introduce Twain as something novel to them.
Bringing Mark Twain to Life
Execution
The biggest part of this project was creating the workflow for rendering Mark Twain. There were two main parts– creating Mark Twain’s voice, and creating 3D model of Mark Twain. The two systems somehow has to work together, and with today’s surge in AI there’s no shortage of potential solutions. The challenge then became how we can get all these systems to work together.
Considerations
Possibilities and limitations of technology
(Full disclosure Isabel handled most of the Convai customization) Through Convai we were able to customize to a certain extent Mark Twain’s voice. We were able to input a backstory, adding any an all kinds of information we could think of. We also could adjust his personality so that it’s reflected in the type of responses Twain would give when someone tries talking to him.
Touchpoint
Accessing a broader audience
Society today has a lot more ways for people to find and reach their audience. A lot of people upload their podcasts to YouTube today to maximize their audience reach.
However after we were done his voice was still very different from the Mark Twain, so we tried customizing word pronunciations to make him sound more southern. The look of Twain arose partly because of the tech issues that we had, and as part of us recognizing that Twain can be modernized to the 21st century through clothing and style.
Content
Leveraging Twain’s rich past
Twain has a rich past that we can draw a lot of subjects on. He was constantly moving, tried a different careers out, and has a successful career as a writer. In addition to his own experiences, simply just by having him as a character from 19th century America and him being in the 21st century opens the door to the possibility of Twain collaborating with celebrities from today.
Tech Diagram
How it all works
This is a representation of how the system would work in an ideal world. We built this tech diagram around how people actually react when they’re in a conversation, and figuring where we can reduce wait times between input and output.
Part of being human is that there are universal truths that we visit and revisit, and these truths are universal because they are timeless. What then does it mean for Twain to be conversing with 21st figures about these universal truths?
Demo Link
Where we got to
“Final”
The main ask from the client was to have a live demo of the project, and additionally we also provided additional use case examples. As a note, there’s a few different… versions of Mark Twain here. Mostly as an artifact of the tech issues we faced. The demo below uses a young Mark Twain, although their clothes and voice we could not change, shows a live version of Mark Twain conversing with someone.
