I Created a Midjourney MOVIE TRAILER: "Whispered Shadows"

people have been creating some really mind-boggling videos in recent weeks using nothing but mid-journey and runway in fact by now I'm pretty sure that most of you have already seen this awesome trailer created by Nicolas Noibat he created an absolutely Epic trailer for the movie Genesis a movie that doesn't actually exist now naturally I was curious to find out just how difficult it would be to create something similar to this so I decided it was time to sit down and start working on my very own fictional movie trailer and honestly it wasn't as difficult as I imagined it would be so if you're curious to find out how I approached this challenge how much time it took and what sort of limitations I ran into then make sure you stick around because I'm going to walk you through the entire process but first let's open the curtain for the theatrical trailer of the movie whispered Shadows really foreign [Music] thank you now that you've seen the full trailer you're probably wondering just how much work went into all of this and that's a very valid question because it can range from just a couple of hours to potentially several days it really comes down to how much you're willing to compromise on the final outcome but one thing I'm pretty sure will surprise you is the exact sequence in order in which I approached this project now it may not seem very intuitive to most of you but you'd be surprised just how critical it is that you start off by choosing the right music I didn't even have a story yet but I knew that I wanted to create a trailer for a thriller so obviously we need some music that not just fits the overall theme but that's also suspenseful and captivates the audience and not only that but the music also largely dictates the pacing of your video so I went to pixabay and searched for some cinematic music I was specifically searching for something in the one to two minute range so something that's not too short but also not too long I went through tons of different songs and to be honest a lot of them were really really great but they just didn't quite fit the theme that I was looking for but luckily I eventually bumped into a song called nuclear bomb by wild sound 159. oh and by the way he has a whole bunch of other really great soundtracks in fact he seems to be really talented so you should definitely go check out his profile on pixabay so so now that I had the music it was time to start working on the story and since I was a little bit tight on time I decided to get some help from chat gbt now just as a heads up some of what I'm about to show you is only possible with a chatgpt Plus subscription so I started a new chat thread using gpt4 as well as code interpreter the reason I chose to work with code interpreter was because I was curious to find out whether it would be able to analyze the audio file and give me recommendations based on it so I uploaded the MP3 file and gave chatbt the following instructions I told it that I'm creating a movie trailer that's roughly 90 seconds long and that it should be suspenseful I also explained that I'd be using mid-journey and runways Gen 2 to create the clips and that I'd need between 16 and 20 different clips finally I asked chatea PT to adopt the Persona of a world leading screenplay writer and that I would like to create a story about a Serial Thriller the specific deliverables I asked for were a title a synopsis summary of what the trailer will show a brief description of each scene and the images we need as well as supporting text that would be added into the trailer for this initial step chat topt just ignored the audio file and decided to focus on Crafting the key details of the story first it gave me all of the details that I asked for but I specifically want to share this very nice synopsis that it put together detective Jane Carter returns to her small Hometown after a decade in the city she's running from a haunting case in the city that she couldn't solve however she's quickly thrust into a new investigation when a string of murders mirrors the unsolved case from her past with each victim a cryptic note is Left Behind a whisper from the killer teasing her and drawing her deeper into the shadows of her own past as Jane races against time to unmask the murderer she must confront her own demons and the possibility that the killer might be someone she once knew at the very end chatted BT recommended that we should listen to the audio in order to determine the pacing for each scene so I asked her to proceed and very much to my surprise it actually literally created a wave form of the audio file and used this to guide me through the entire 90 seconds of our trailer now as fascinating as this may seem at first glance it wasn't without challenges so while tatibility began by assigning one to two scenes to every 10 seconds it eventually just stuffed scenes 13 through 20 into the very last 10 seconds of the trailer now obviously that doesn't really work and it took quite a few additional instructions until I finally got to a point where it was doing what I wanted it to do and to be frank I actually made quite a few additional changes to the sequence and the flow of the video once I got to the point where I was editing the video myself however I must admit that having even a very basic structure in place makes it considerably easier just to get started with the whole project now just for context everything up until now had taken me roughly around 30 to 45 minutes so now that I had the music a story and a very rudimentary beat sheet it was time to start working on the images and animated clips now there are different ways that you can approach this you can either first create all of your images in my journey and then start animating them in Gen 2 or and that's what I did you can work on all of the scenes one by one first creating the images that you need and then simply animating them the key advantage of doing it this way is that while your images are processing in Gen 2 you can already start working on the new images for the next scene and this actually saves you quite a bit of time because processing the images in Gen 2 can be rather time consuming especially if you're working with the upscaled versions of the eclipse but before I created even a single image for any particular scene I first wanted to get a good idea of what our character Jane would actually look like and I eventually landed on the following prompt imagine film still 40 year old female detective with light brown long hair standing in a rural Town Autumn season creepy warm color tones foggy including a seat now I know there are many different ways to achieve a decent level of consistency but for the purposes of the project I was working on right here simply using a seed was good enough for me and this is actually one of those compromises that I talked about at the beginning of the video so if one of your complaints is that the character in the trailer is not always 100 consistent please just remember that was a compromise you can get this to work better but it will take you considerably more time so now that I had a decent character prompt I started working on all of the individual scenes I would first create between two and three images for any given scene and then I would simply upload them to runway for processing the image to an animated clip here's an example of the prompt that I used for the image where Jane is standing in front of a wall full of research notes imagine film still 40 year old female detective with light brown long hair solving mystery notes and thread on wall creepy tense and then I added my parameters and this gave me the following set of images to choose from hey sorry to interrupt you right smack in the middle but I just wanted to share something with you YouTube is an absolutely amazing way to discover and learn new skills just like the video that you're watching right here however as you discover these videos and tutorials you're never quite sure when they were recorded whether they're still relevant and how they fit into the bigger picture of learning to use and control mid Journey so if you're looking to get a comprehensive training in the foundations of prompting in my journey and I highly recommend that you check out my video course at masters of your journey.com which gives you a comprehensive education in learning how to control my journey and how to prompt with intent I ended up using the top left as well as the bottom left images to create a number of clips the results were okay and I even used one of these in the final trailer however you can also clearly see some of the challenges that come with working in gen 2. and that's why there are a few things I need to point out here at this stage of the video animating your mid Journey images in Gen 2 is still a little bit Hit or Miss sometimes you'll get an amazing clip with your very first attempt but in other cases you'll end up re-rolling the very same image over and over and over again and with very little Improvement and in some cases it's actually much better to just pick an entirely different image to work with simply because the one that you originally chose doesn't want to produce a decent animated clip another thing that can be incredibly frustrating is that very often the faces of your characters will get distorted through the animation process this seems to work a lot better with extreme close-ups or portraits of characters however it can be an incredibly frustrating process because you end up wasting so many credits on clips that might even be useless in the end now from what I hear Pica Labs may be a little bit better animating faces at the expense of movement but that's not something that I've tested myself yet so maybe I'll be able to report on that at a later stage the purposes of this video and this trailer I decided to just stick with Runway 10-2 so once I had decent clips for all of the scenes that I need I loaded up DaVinci Resolve and started working on editing my trailer now so far every single tool that I've used in this process has been a paid tool Chachi PT Plus costs 20 per month my majority Pro subscription costs me 60 per month and for this project I started off with runaways Pro subscription at 35 per month now that being said if you're going to be a heavy user of Gen 2 then the unlimited plan at 95 per month can buy you a lot of freedom anyway given all of these costs which are actually quite substantial for a private user you'll probably be happy to hear that the video editor that I used to DaVinci Resolve is 100 for free and that's actually despite the fact that it's an absolute Beast of a software now editing the trailer is probably the easiest and most fun part of the entire process you basically just add the audio and then you slowly add clip for clip into your timeline the only thing that you really need to pay attention to is that the cutscenes sync up with the Beats of the music that you've chosen and this is also the stage in the process where you begin to understand and why I chose the music first before actually creating any of my images now obviously would be great if everything just always worked according to plan but as you know things rarely do go according to plan there are a couple of issues that you may run into during the video editing process your Clips may not be long enough to make it to the next beat so in other words they're actually too short the sequence of your Clips might not actually feel right or they don't actually reflect the story the way you want to tell it or your Clips don't actually look as great as you thought they did when you originally created them now getting to the point where we are now in the process can actually be pretty quick I would say that it took me between three and four hours of very focused work to create a rough trailer that already includes my music as well as the entire story however the next and final step can easily take the exact same amount of time or potentially even much more it's important to remember that fine-tuning is a very subjective process and the amount of time that it will take largely depends on your willingness to compromise are you willing to accept that a clip is just good enough or does it need to be absolutely 100 perfect are you willing to accept that there may be small but strange artifacts in your Clips or must they absolutely be removed is it okay for your character's face to be slightly deformed in certain scenes or must it be a hundred percent sharp remember as amazing as this technology is there are certain limitations to what it can do right now and even if it was capable of producing the exact result that you're looking for it might take endless amounts of re-rolling and you need to figure out whether that's actually worth your time as with all things it's always a trade-off and your ability to compromise on certain things will largely depend on how important it is for you to produce a Pixel Perfect result another thing that you'll have to keep in mind is that depending on how specific your vision is you may also need to do additional work beyond what I've shown you so far so for example in order to create the clip that you see right here on screen I actually had to edit my mid-journey image in an external image editor the original image looked like this and then I open it up in Affinity designer and I added some text I then animated this new image and runway in order to get the clip that you just saw earlier another challenge is as always the consistency of your character's face so not only is the fact that Gen 2 tends to deform the phases of characters a significant challenge but it's also difficult to just make sure that the character itself looks similar and consistent in every single one of your images face swapping the images or maybe even the clips is potentially a way to solve some of these issues however bear in mind that it may take significant experimentation with absolutely unclear outcomes so depending on how much time you can actually dedicate to your project this may not be a viable solution because you can't afford to work for hours and hours and hours until you get an outcome that isn't even actual progress anyway I hope you enjoyed the trailer as well as this behind the scenes look and maybe it will inspire you to create your very own movie trailer as well remember to check out the video description for my majority course as well as a whole bunch of other free stuff and that's it for today I'll see you next week take care and keep on learning cheers [Music] [Music]

Channel: Tokenized AI by Christian Heidorn

Views: 13,522

Keywords: midjourney, midjourney v5, midjourney version 5, midjourney tutorial, midjourney prompts, midjourney workflow, midjourney learn, midjourney 5.2, midjourney trailer, midjourney movie, runway movie, runway gen 2, gen 2, midjourney video, ai movie trailer

Id: MfK-WkKUnKQ

Length: 16min 15sec (975 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 26 2023