The Strangest Things Happen

 Good morning everyone, and thank you so much for being here.

Like most kids, I grew up loving Christmas and all the things that it stood for. In the small town I grew up in we always had a Santa at the local fire department greeting children, Main Street was decorated, and on Main Street there was a small clothing store that had an animatronic Santa in the picture window every year. This little Santa mystified me and intrigued me, the way that it moved seemed so magical to me.

My mom also collected a little village and it had all these shops and people and a little train and all kinds of little stuff that you could put together when she had the whole set. It took her years to collect this village, my mom was very good at finding things at garage sales and other places, she had a knack for tracking stuff down. I would help her set this village up and it just made the season all the more magical. Halloween was also another favorite of mine and our little town, while not as extensive as Christmas, did similar things for Halloween that I have very fond memories of and there were similar decorations that my mom had, some village sets and such.

When I started seeing all these AI videos on Facebook, admittedly I was a little bit turned off by them. Some of them seemed really fun and I could see the kind of potential that they had with what some people were doing. Years ago when my mom was not doing too well I left my job to take care of her, during this time I had been dabbling doing some gig work, which is what they call it now, they did not call it that then, at Amazon and other online companies. I self published a few books, coloring books and did some designs for t-shirts and such. I never made a great success at it but it did help.

So I had a few pages on Facebook, one of them was a Christmas page which I had created for a children's book that I was working on that never came to fruition, and an inspirational journal I had done for my mother, and a Happy Halloween page for a Halloween picture book that I did.

I thought to myself that I was going to try to do some AI videos myself because they looked like fun and I wanted to do something unique that I had not seen anyone else doing. So I combined the memories of the holidays that I had of Christmas and Halloween, the amusement rides that I remembered, the animatronics, the Christmas village. First I made Halloween videos for my Happy Halloween page at first. And it was September so it was close to Halloween. I experimented with many different AI, I found it was best to use many of them together to get what I wanted. I finally got my first video together the way I wanted it and I posted it on my page, I got used to it, it did not take long to script ideas out and then use them for prompts once I got the basic idea down and made a few more videos, it took me a few days to get things how I wanted them before I published them on my page.

Less than 24 hours later my phone was just dinging like crazy, it seemed a couple of the videos that I had put up had thousands upon thousands of views and likes and it was just mind blowing. I could not believe that people actually liked what I was doing, so I kept doing it. Fortunately I was off for a few days from my job and so I just buckled down and started scripting as many different videos as I could and putting them on my page, which it turns out is not something that Facebook wants you to do, they restricted my page for 24 hours because I was putting too many videos on there. After the cooldown I finally found the right formula for how many videos I could do and which AI tools, editing tools worked for me in tandem.

I then started looking at my page other page, The North Pole, and I wanted to do Christmas videos but I thought there is no way that my videos would do what they were doing on my Halloween page, taking off like they are. But I thought it would be fun so I did them exactly how I was doing my Halloween videos except with a Christmas theme. To my surprise they took off too and boy did they. And it takes sometimes a couple hours to get one video right because these AI tools can be stubborn and tricky to work with. But sometimes if I have a good script that I took time to write they go fairly quickly, if I run into a headache I just stop and move forward to something else, I found that to be the best thing to do.

And now here I am getting messages from people that I never thought would message me. It is just completely mind blowing as I said before, heartwarming, a little bit scary, but some of the most fun that I have had in a while. I started trying to monetize my social media pages so I can grow them into something, I honestly do not know what yet, that is maybe something bigger and perhaps more fun for everyone. I want to make something that I would feel my parents would be proud of, because even though they do not know it, they helped create these pages too. Miss them so much.