Welcome To 21st Century Mouse
Many thanks for visiting our website, it's new and incomplete but hopefully about to get interesting. as of today (September 2nd 2024) we're going to start adding behind the scenes video and images from our indie sci-fi project which we're producing for YouTube. Please subscribe to our channel if you'd like to show support as this is a "mom & pop" operation right now and we've got lots of work to do. Although the work we do is mostly hand-crafted, we're also including some motivational model-making videos here created using AI. The video above, however, is all us baby!
Okay, after google mislaid our previous website I'm going to start this new one, featuring animatronics, spaceships, art, AI and our videos. Follow us on YouTube (21st Century Mouse). I'll get this website up and running as fast as I can but for now I'll just upload our stuff randomly.
21st Century Mouse
Everything is a mess here while we upload and assemble content from our other platforms such as Instagram and YouTube, but we hope you''ll enjoy some of these videos from our ongoing series "Virtual Model Spacecraft Construction Studio" which depicts a fantasy movie model shop using carefully created images from Midjourney AI (version 5.2 & 6.0). The series is where we test some of our compositing and animatronics in the intros, using systems like Blender, D-ID and ElevenLabs. There's a lot of preparation going on for our new series independent sci-fi series about a robot from the future and there's going to be a lot of behind-the-scenes on this website, not just "virtual" modelmaking.
Note: The robot at the start of these videos is our animatronic creation built in 1998 for live entertainment, and is currently using the name "Mouse" which stands for Multi-Optional Utilities & Security Electromechanoid. Just under 4 feet tall he's our flagship robot built entirely by hand from cardboard frozen pizza boxes. We take recycling to quite serious levels here and have done so since 1986, but that's another story. You'll notice his voice was changed after part 1 of this spacecraft modelling series, as again we're testing everything before committing to filming.
This video is the beginning of a series depicting a future version of countries around the world. Again, it's a test-bed for our attempts to incorporate AI technology into storytelling and filmmaking, especially for the robot "Mouse" where we wanted to see how well ElevenLabs AI voice systems coped with a continuous narrative. Although the title of the video suggests that AI is making the predictions in fact it is the sci-fi writings of Edward Houghton (creative head of 21st Century Mouse) except for a couple of lines written by Chat GPT. The images were made using Midjourney AI and is once again only intended as a test video for YouTube.
Most of the videos you're seeing at this stage are carefully made using AI to create a "suggestions-menu" for your own designs, such as helping you to come up with colour or detail arrangements without wasting your precious time and materials. While many people hate the mere idea of AI the fact is that if you liked the original "Toy Story", you already were watching AI in action. It just wasn't called that then. The programmers weren't deciding where every pixel went by hand, they were typing in instructions, moving a mouse and then letting the algorithms do the work. Not that we intend to use lots of AI in our sci-fi series so don't worry, this will be a mostly hand-crafted show with human beings at the helm from script to post-production.