Creeping You Out (on purpose)

and how you can creep out other ppl too! PART 1

May 23, 2025

So! My flight yesterday was delayed, I wouldn’t have landed till 1 AM, so I rebooked it — and now I have three days at home off?!?!?!

I was gonna renderfarm BUT — I really need to get caught up on doing Photobomb promo, and I wanted to learn all this video editing anyhow, so that’s up next!

If you go back and read my post “The Boy Who Never Woke” you’ll realize I’ve started a creepy instagram in relation to this book I have coming out in June.

That book only has two pre-orders.

I haven’t done any *real* marketing for it and, TBQH, I’m not sure all this faffery I’m doing now counts? BUT — it also very-very-could, so lemme narrate it here.

I’ve already got my creepy images for IG set, courtesy of Maluridae — who does AMAZING premade covers! — but now I need something more…lively.

Something even creepier…

Something for me, as an Author on the Internet to respond to.

So…may I present to you, Lara Simon, the main character from Photobomb, who is righteously pissed at me for publishing her journal…. this isn’t done yet! this is just so you can see what I’m doing, and what all of this is gonna be building towards!

Here’s how I created this video step-by-step — should I go full geek here? I’ll go full geek here.

This part of the geek you can probably skip: There’s a site like Pinterest/Tumbler out there that I’d never heard of before called Cosmos, which is like a fashion photography website? When I watched Sirio’s video last week about character consistency — DO NOT WATCH THIS UNLESS YOU ARE A SUPER NERD, IT GOES TOO DEEP —

he mentioned it. (This is the guy I paid $99 for to chat with in regards to the fancy program he’s using to run his models, called Comfy. Time and money well spent, and he was lovely! Have I mentioned how so many AI professionals are actually APPROACHABLE right now?) —

BUT

I’m sharing that because in it, in the text part of the video, he’s got TWO GPTS available.

That’s right peeps, we’re gonna hang out with GPTS IN STEREO.

One of them I didn’t need, but the other might actually help you if you’re a baby prompter, which is why I’m sharing it:

The top one there (not in that image, but in the text beneath his video — which again, plz don’t watch, it’s not for us, unless you want to go into e-commerce model design.)

Holy shit I just realized I can make it into a button — but Imma leave all that stuff there to give him props for it:

Character Prompt Creation GPT

The sweet thing about THAT GPT tho, is, if you don’t have any experience writing a prompt to get a good clean image — it’ll do it for you.

So open it up — and go click on the little profile for it — and then PIN IT to your side bar, so that you’ll get to keep it, where all of your GPTs can hang out.

You’ll see I don’t have that many:

But there’s literally 1000’s you can choose from, that are created/programed to help you with specific tasks, and that’s a great thing to know.

(I’m actually glad we took this digression, for that alone!)

ANYHOO —

When I was trying out his (very hard) character perfection method (that involved comfy) — he had everyone pick images from Cosmos and then come back w/them for his Character Creator GPT, and asked it to desc them for us — I just had it ‘redo’ Lara for me right now, to show y’all:

So if you’re ever in a place where you’re all “wtf words should I be using to get this *precise* character look” — especially in a way that you can isolate it to use for something else!!! — this GPT might be the one for you.

I promise you you won’t always need/want that much detail? But — it’s sometimes great to have!

SO — I took my Lara (the Lara I created w/this prompt prior, on MJ):

(her neck is too long, ugh) — and gave it to GPT — which is where character consistency shines! — and told it to give her a red sweater — which is how I got to where I got! (And you can see how close that ‘red sweater Lara’ face is to the original one above!!!)

Then, because I’m me, and anal, I took *that* image to Magnific — why? Because I want my characters to look as amazing as possible:

The ‘upscaled’ version is on the right, the slider indicates that the left side hasn’t been done yet — see how much better the eyebrows and hairs look, once they’ve been upscaled? The difference in quality is insane.

MJ has an upscaler built in (actually, so does Ideogram?) but Magnific’s is just best in class (however it is a separate cost, aie!)

The thing is, for me, you’re always gonna lose some detail in future processing, especially in going to video, so it’s better to start off with the HIGHEST res image you can, IMO.

And you’re like, “Cassie, this sure seems like a PITA.”

Yeah. You’re not wrong! BUT — now I’ve got this character *LOCKED* in and I can do whatever I want with her!

Which means taking her to video and animating her saying my stuff, MUHAHAHAHA.

But — I’ve become accustomed to the vagaries of substack, I know I’m pushing up on the ‘extranaeous media’ attachements and ‘too long emails’ guardrails here, plus also I need to save my wrists for intensive video editing work.

But also fuck it, I’m having fun, let’s wait till substack yells at me….

(Y’all are learning from me at right-the-fuck time, because I genuinely enjoy teaching things, but in a few months all of this is going to be so old hat for me I’ll be bored talking about it, lol.)

Onward to audio!

Now — you might be all, “why on earth would you do your audio first?”

BECAUSE IT IS SUPER FUCKING IMPORTANT.

Audio gives video cadence. And if your audio is about someone speaking — you need to figure that out and get the timing right, for everything else coming down the pipeline.

So I headed over to 11labs.

Jack (my GPT) and I had already worked out a script for this video, so all I needed to do at 11labs was find a voice. (Note, again, 11 labs is pay to play, and I’m sorry about that — although they may have a free trial!)

I hunted through their options till I found one that sounded nice and creepy —