Like many other Filipinos, Sheila Coronel’s story “The Making of Edgar Matobato” resonated with me, with its powerful narrative and deep reflection on the confessions of a hired killer and the country’s recent history of drug-related killings.
I felt that it was a story that needed to reach more people and wondered if there was a way to transform the story into other formats like video and audio, to give it a chance to find audiences in platforms where they consume content and information.
With Sheila’s permission, I experimented with generative AI to create multimedia elements to transform the story into this video. I used AI tools to generate images and turn photos into illustrations; create voiceovers for the story; turn the images into animation; and create haunting music for the soundtrack.
Jaemark tordecilla
It was a story that needed to reach more people and wondered if there was a way to transform the story into other formats like video and audio, to give it a chance to find audiences in platforms where they consume content and information.
I completed the work, alone, in two days. Working with humans for these media elements would’ve taken many more days, if not weeks. While I used AI as a tool, the control remained with me as the producer throughout the process.
I constantly made creative decisions from curating the images to choosing the voice models to being in control of editing. For example, I chose to generate AI images in the style of ink sketches with watercolor streaks, to underscore that these are merely symbolic illustrations while still being evocative of the story’s original narrative. I also adapted photos from the piece by Vincent Go into illustrations, to be true to how Matobato looked.
Through it all, my goal was to preserve the narrative punch and deep meditation in the story.
Job displacement is a concern for many journalists and media workers when it comes to generative AI. However, for many newsrooms with limited resources and shrinking headcounts, those jobs never existed in the first place, and so no job displacement would take place at all.
For this story, simply put, it would not exist in this format without generative AI. — PCIJ.org
