Music Video: Empress of Shadows

Now that I've done a few music videos, I started to wonder: what other types of songs could we produce that would benefit the wargaming hobby? And it hit me: what about military history?

It was almost a year ago that I reviewed Hapsburgs on the Rio Grande, and the subject is one that has always interested me. With the help of AI, could I make a music video about the French Intervention in Mexico?

After pondering the idea for a few days, I decided to narrow the topic specifically to Empress Carlotta – such an interesting, and ultimately tragic, individual.

I pointed the AI in the right direction, gave it my best guidelines, and asked it to write some lyrics. I then rewrote the lyrics, ultimately coming up with:

From the bells of Brussels to the Mexican sun,
She believed in a kingdom that had already won.
With Maximilian’s hand and a crown of pure gold,
She bought into a story that shouldn't be told.
Ambition was the engine, the "brains" of the pair,
Building a castle out of thin, mountain air.

(Chorus)
Oh, Carlota, the world was too wide,
For a throne made of cactus and European pride.
One year a Goddess in a palace of light,
Then sixty long years in the dark of the night.
The Empress of shadows on a desolate coast.

The French ships are leaving, the gold’s run away,
While Juarez is coming to settle the pay.
She ran to the Pope with a scream in her throat,
"There’s glass in the water! There’s blood on my coat!"
While she hid in the Vatican, lost in her head,
The rifles in Queretaro left him for dead.

(Bridge)
One shot for the Empire, one for the man,
The madness begins where the glory began.

(Chorus)
Oh, Carlota, the world was too wide,
For a throne made of cactus and European pride.
One year a Goddess, then sixty a ghost,
The Empress of shadows on a desolate coast.

(Outro)
Adiós, Mamá Carlota...

I later discovered that it helped to spell 'Juarez' as 'Warrez' for the AI to pronounce it correctly.

I was new to using Sonauto directly through its own website, and used the default method where you select music tags before generating a song. I tried a number of variations, but the final tags I used were "folk, singer-songwriter, folk rock."

Note that in the final song, the AI failed to use either the bridge or the outro, but provided a lengthy instrumental ending.

For the artwork, I discovered that Gemini (which I used to generate the first-draft lyrics) could also generate artwork based on the lyrics! (It uses the Nano Banana AI for the art, and it limits how much art can be generated per day.) It gave me this art for the song:

I then realized that I could animate this artwork to make the music video more interesting. I used the SeeDance AI to have the empress fan herself, resulting in this loop:

The final step was to combine the music and the animating art with titles, using ClipChamp:

That's my first historical music video completed!

One problem with the looping animation is that I failed to instruct the AI not to zoom, resulting in a pattern where the camera zooms in and out throughout the video.

I've also posted the video as a reel on the TMP Facebook page – this is a link to the later captioned video, as the original video had no English captions – where it has been well received. This is a large file, so you may find it easier to view on Facebook if you have access there.