A Tale of Two Cities

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Charles Dickens is one of the most celebrated authors in English literature. His story A Christmas Carol has basically attained mythic status in western culture. I voraciously read his work as a young lad and made my way through Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and other works.

Although Dickensian literature is considered high-brow culture, from time to time, one comes across references of Charles Dickens in popular culture. This particular example is from a TV show called Cheers, which aired from 1982 to 1993 in the US and Canada.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…
--A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities is generally considered Charles Dicken's best novel. These opening lines from that work are well known, and perhaps they're the only lines that people actually memorize from his work. It is genius because they're basically a synopsis of the themes discussed in the novel, which surround an age of dualities and polarization that existed around the time of the French revolution. The French revolution is important to western cultures because this event sent shockwaves of change through the western world, including colonial America.

I consider Charles Dickens the ultimate Steampunk author. He was there in the thick of things as the might of the industrial revolution began churning and steaming. Sometimes told from the point of view of young characters, his stories tackle the social disparities that were magnified during the age of industrialization.

I created the images using ChatGPT (DALL-E 3). I prompted it to develop scenes from Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities using different quotes from the opening lines. For example, 'it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness'.

The themes addressed in the story A Tale of Two Cities include the following:

• Wisdom and foolishness
• Belief and incredulity
• Light and Darkness
• Hope and Despair

In keeping with the pop-culture theme, I asked ChatGPT to give the images a comic-book flavour and style to the images.

I generated the song in the AI music creator called Udio. I prompted the software to create a classical song for the French Revolution. The song that you hear in the video is called Revolution's Echo.

To create the video, I used MS Clipchamp. The voice over was a bit tricky to work with because one has to get the timing and tone just right. I added a bit of artistic flair with the ghostly words that appear and disappear throughout the video. I hope you enjoyed it.

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