Exploring Shakespeare’s First Folio also triggers an exploration of the various characters in his plays. The rich variety of these include fantastic characters from Midsummer Night’s Dream in addition to tragic ones from Othello.

Multiple experiments with characters popping out of a book were explored using several Gen AI text-image then finalizing with image-video. This gave me ideas for potential motion of characters to inspired an animation team. Experiments with Kaiber started to give the idea of characters popping out of the book itself and provided another dimension to consider for future explorations. Further experiments led to the visualizations of characters not just popping out of the book but starting to imply the different types of blocking that would occur as they jumped, danced, and smoked their way out of the book. What might we learn from these characters? What stories might they tell beyond the ones they were confined to be a part of in Shakespeare’s plays? What might the witches of Macbeth say? What would any character say to Shakespeare if they had a chance? What might Shakespeare say? Clearly from these very visual-oriented explorations there came a need to interact with the text and see what actors, a director and dramaturg might co-create when confronted with text that was generated in the style of Shakespeare from a large language model.