“They were silent except for the whistling of the wind they created with their quickly flapping wings and heavy panting when they began to wear down. They looked like hummingbirds with dragonfly wings and little baby faces, which Sadie would have found beautiful if they hadn’t just killed Mongul. How could such beauty be so evil?” -excerpt from the Twelve Realms Book One by M. Skinner.
I love movies. So much so that I worked at a movie theater as a second job primary so I could get free movie tickets. I ended up doing a job I don’t think exists anymore, building movies and previewing them. I would spend hours listening to music while I spliced reels of film together, or broken them down to send back in their metal canisters. But no matter how much I loved to watch a movie, I always loved books more. You can take your time with a book, developing the scene, and getting to know the characters. You become more invested in the story with a book. It takes time, like all good relationships do.
And so, one of my biggest pet peeves are movies based on a book I love. One of the first series I ever read as a young girl was the Black Stallion by Walter Farley. I loved, loved, loved reading those books and searched the library for new titles. It led me to other horse authors, and once I had read all of those, to animal books in general. But there was something about the wild natural, and deep love, the Black Stallion had for Alec, that I couldn’t find anywhere else. When the movie came out, I rushed to the theater to see it, but was so disappointed that the image I saw on the screen wasn’t the one playing in my mind as I read the book. There were too many discrepancies. Overall, it match the story pretty well for a movie. As the years went by, and I saw more movies based on books, my outrage grew as some movies barely matched the actual story at all. I liked the version of the story I created in my mind as I read much more than the one quickly developed to get the story told in under two hours.
AI has added a new twist to this visualizing what we read. My challenge to you is take the excerpt above, paste it into any AI image creator you would like, and see if you can find an image that matches what you imagine it should look like as you read it. Share it in the comments. I would love to see all the different variations created.
