Re-imagining Storytelling with Midjourney: Creating a Recurring Character

[Music] hi I'm Jen with making the photo today's video is all about storytelling with mid-journey I'll show you how to create a character that you can use throughout your story in different situations we'll be using a prompting recipe so let's gather together the ingredients we need for each part of the recipe and then we'll put it all together The Prompt recipe that we're using in this video was created by Master prompter clarinet I'll put a link to clarinet's formula and notes in the description below I tested the prompt recipe and it works a treat there are a few limitations to the recipe and I have a few suggestions along the way but let's start with the basic recipe to see how it works first you'll start with a reference image for my first example I'm going to use this image of a gang of fantasy creatures I'm starting with an image that I created in mid-journey but you could start with a sketch or a photo the type of image you use is going to influence what the AI renders later in this video I'll Circle back with some tips and suggestions for choosing a reference image for your prompt you're going to need a URL of your reference image the easiest way to get a URL is to send it to yourself in Discord drag your image into the Discord message bar and click return or enter now right click on the image and select copy link you're going to start your prompt with the reference image paste the URL into your prompt the URL will be quite a bit longer to start with but Discord will shorten it down to something that looks like this next let's set the stage in the prompt typed setting is then describe the scene this is a short phrase that describes the background or the setting choose a couple of key descriptions too much description will overwhelm the AI your setting might be a forest a Bazaar or a bathroom whatever makes sense to your character the setting doesn't have to match the reference image but the further away you get from the reference image the more variable the results I set my character in a pub the setting implied by the reference image later in this video I'll show you how to move your character to a different setting in your prompt you now have a reference image URL and the setting now describe your character start by giving your character a name my character's name is Mimsy then describe your character there are a lot of ways you can describe your character but choose just a couple of key details too much detail and the AI will be overwhelmed and start giving you strange results your description may take a little Tweaky remember the AI has the reference image you're just targeting a couple of key characteristics my character changed a lot if I added too much detail for instance when I added alien hands as part of the prompt Mimsy became more green Toad and less pinky Pig you might want to use a thesaurus to find the fewest descriptive words your prompt now has an image a setting and your character's name and description use a double colon to separate the sections you're telling mid-journey that you want to treat these elements separately you are creating a multi-prompt if you haven't created multi-prompts before see my video multi-promps in mid-journey should you use them I'll put a link in the description below now place your character character in the scene here you can add something situation specific like an outfit a prop or an action you can add an emotion or a pose type setting contains then the name of your character and something specific to the scene there are some limitations to what you can do with your character and will dive deeper into this in a minute for right now I'll choose something that goes along with the setting I'll see if I can get Mimsy to play poker in the pub here's the prompt so far we have an image a setting we've named and described our character and added an action there is one more step recommended by clarinet although I found this step optional finally add atmosphere or style to your prompt style includes any relevant artists here's clarinet's example I popped my image into clip interrogator to give me some ideas clip interrogator is a handy tool it's an AI that describes an image including Styles and artists if you haven't used clip interrogator before see my video how AI image generators see you I'll put a link in the description below I added a few of the suggested style words to my prompt your style doesn't have to match the image but you may get more variable results the further afield you go I found that if my image was in the style I wanted I could omit this step add this section if you want to tweak or try and change the style of the reference image you're almost done with your prompt just one more thing to add finally we're going to run the prompt in version 4 of mid-journey clarinet wrote this recipe for both version 3 and version 4 of mid-journey but I haven't had much success in version 3. if you haven't explored mid Journey version 4 see my video first look at Mid Journey version 4 amazing upgrade I'll put a link in the description below you have all the ingredients you need to create your character type slash imagine into the message bar and enter each element into your your character prompt separate each section with a double colon here we have it Mimzy playing poker is the character exactly the same as the reference photo no but he's of the same world with many of the same features you may not get the result you want the first time so be ready to re-roll remix and make variations and don't forget to add the dash dash B4 parameter at the end of your prompt using the exact same prompt the result in B3 is quite a bit different so now you have your basic character recipe let's try changing things up a bit and try a new setting I moved minsey to a Village Green to play cricket now I moved him to a bathroom for a bath and finally to the bank where he counted his ill-gotten gains there are a few limitations your character won't look exactly the same each time there will be some details added or removed by mid-journey but all the characters live in the same fantasy world now that you have the basic recipe for building a character in mid-journey let's fine tune the results and talk about some of the limitations and how to overcome these the reference image that you use has a huge effect on the style and the result but also on the character itself my reference image contained both Mimzy and his crew minsey stood out so the AI found him but noticed that in all of the resulting photos there were other background characters even in the bathroom the characters all look like they were from the world of minzy but not recognizable from the original image the best reference image isolates your character you may be able to crop in on your image or remove distracting elements using Photoshop or another photo editing tool it doesn't have to be perfect I created this anime character in DG Journey mid Journey's anime a text to image AI generator I'm calling her niji or rainbow if you want to know more about niji Journey see my video Nichi Journey the best kept secret in anime image generation I'll put a link in the description below using the prompt recipe I can move her to different settings overlooking a vast Valley on a city street or high up on a balcony overlooking the city but notice that the amount of body shown and the relative posture is similar to the reference image if you use only a face in your reference image the AI will struggle to imagine the rest of your character's body if your reference image doesn't have legs the AI probably won't add legs niji was standing in a heroic pose if I tried to make niji do something that was very different from this body posture the AI simply refused no matter how much prompting I couldn't get her to jump off a building or fly but if I change the reference image in Photoshop even roughly and Main niji more horizontal like she was flying and ran the prompt again I had much better your prompt if you have a setting that you want to place your character into use a image for your character and an image for your setting I made this medieval Bazaar also in Nietzsche journey by simply adding the reference image and the setting reference mid-journey combines the images with minimal prompting one major limitation of this storytelling aspect of mid-journey is that it's difficult to get two characters in one image I made niji a tiger companion named Torah I could easily get niji to move settings and Torah to move settings but it was much more difficult to add niji and Torah to the same setting mostly mid-journey just got confused and mixed Torah and niji into one character though I did get one frame with both characters so patience and a lot of re-rolls and remixes may do the trick one of the benefits of multi-prompting is that you can weight each section you can tell mid Journey if you want the character description to be stronger or the setting to be stronger meet my character Jubjub he's a studious bird so I'm trying to put him in a library but I was not being very successful if you're struggling to get a character into a setting here are two things to try try repeating the word that you want either exactly or with a synonym I changed my prompt to double up on the library idea and that helped a lot but also remember that you're working with a multi-prompt and with multi-prompts you can add weights I added the number three to the setting part of the prompt I really mean Library that totally did the trick my bird character is now in the library as I was making this video mid-journey rolled out three by two aspect ratios in version 4. to get an aspect ratio type dash dash AR3 colon 2 to get the longer image or two colon 3 to get the taller image using this prompt recipe you can tell a story with one character the details of the character will vary a little bit across the images but you can keep the major characteristics and the general Vibe of the character share tips and tricks for creating a character in mid-journey in the comments below if this video was helpful remember to like the video and subscribe to the channel this is Janet making the photo let's make something amazing together [Music] thank you

Channel: Making the Photo

Views: 25,476

Keywords: photography, digital photography, post processing, photo editing

Id: jdFo-QDhBl0

Length: 11min 4sec (664 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2022