RodeTales

The Acorn Chronicles

Jack was a very ordinary boy...

...with an extraordinary life. He had fought an epic battle with a monster since he was three years old. Even though the monster tried and tried, he could not beat Jack. Night after terrible night, the monster would visit and torment him.

"Do not upset yourself or prepare to read the trials and suffering of a poor young boy. Instead, I will tell you the tales of Jack’s nighttime journeys and how he left the monster alone, angry and full of hatred for himself and others, while Jack journeyed across space and time in a huge acorn that grew in his garden, in an old oak tree beyond the stream, just visible from his bedroom window."

Augmented Storytelling

The Acorn Chronicles is a story written 100% traditionally, with much autobiographical influence and feeling.

Recent developments in machine learning and image creation, particularly text to image services have resulted in an explosion of expression and not a little confusion. The results are both astonishing and terrifying in their accomplishment. As a sometime illustrator and writer, they hint at obsolescence for commercial artists and illustrators. However, they are mesmerising in their beauty and uncanny ability to see through the words and pull something that was hidden from view, even suggest omissions from the writing, even point in a new direction. I am comfortable and intrigued enough to explore what generative art can tell me about my own writing and how it can be improved by what it reveals.

The images were generated using Midjourney. To create them, I entered text from the story along with a few parameters, such as aspect ratio and occasionaly a style, such as woodcut or line drawing. The best results were often generated by allowing midjourney to deploy its 'house style', an epic painterly canvas from some undiscovered old master.