Watanabe | Indie Shorts Mag Short Film Festival 2024

I decided to try my hand at making a film entirely by AI. And here are four things I learned.

🆕 GenAI will enable a whole new set of people to join the creator economy. I truly believe there will be a net gain with the wider adoption of these tools. Take me as an example. I was never able to create this film before.

🎥 Hollywood will become interactive. Movies will become personalised, as it will be possible to generate the many number of paths a movie can morph into easily. Gaming and Hollywood will blur. I expect lots of M&A to streamline production of both.

📊 Control is where existing models fail a bit. Due to their statistical nature, it’s very hard to get exactly what you want. It’s always a bit random, so I’ve learned to embrace and love the random.

🧑‍🏫 Education will be the primary driver of adoption. GenAI education is and will continue to be a business on its own. Without the resources I found, I couldn’t have done what I did.

Having gotten my hands dirty, I now know first hand what is possible, and I am beyond excited for what is to come. And I didn’t even have access to Sora, which I suspect will make my workflow even easier.

Now, for those of you interested in the tools I used and my process, see below:

1️⃣ Started with a short story I had written a long time ago on self-discovery & self-love.
2️⃣ Teamed up with ChatGPT to refine it into a mix of prose and poetry.
3️⃣ Storyboarded each scene in Notion, mixing AI suggestions with my own creative vision.
4️⃣ Used Midjourney to craft stunning visuals, ensuring a consistent style by leveraging their style and character reference features for continuity, which is a game changer.
5️⃣ Brought these stills to life with Runway ML's superior brush tools for that perfect animation with a bit more control over the motion.
6️⃣ Added depth with a carefully modulated Elevenlabs voiceover, aiming for a narrative that breathes emotion.

All in all, it took me 16-24 hours to perfect, including the initial learning phase of each tool.

And if you’d like some guidance along the way, take a look at my brand new creative accelerator. Over four immersive 1.5 hour weekly video calls, you'll go through the entire AI filmmaking process, from ideation to final edit, to create your very own 1-min film. It starts every month with limited spaces. Check it out!