WWAI - A short film utilizing lots of AI tools, about WW2 with the enemy being AI robots.
WWAI
A short film utilizing lots of AI tools, about WW2 with the enemy being AI robots.
I had been experimenting loads with Midjourney and wanted to see if I could create a short story, using predominately AI stills and an AI voiceover. I had used AI voiceovers in the past for animatics, but they were all rubbish and unusable for final VO’s. While I was researching, more and more of these popped up increasing in realism and showing the crazy speed of this new technology. I settled on ElevenLabs, as they have this awesome stability slider, which adds so much realism to the voices.
So, at this point I knew I could ‘create’ some great images through Midjourney and get a pretty realistic VO. I needed to look at the script next…
ChatGpt had recently launched, so I hopped on there. I gave it a little direction and within ten minutes of back and forth. I had my script.
I wanted to pepper the film a little with some archive footage, just to try to help set it firmly within the WW2 realm. So, I found free stock footage and used TopazVideoAI to upscale/denoiser the stock.
Next up I saw herds of AI influencers using the D-ID tools to make an image of a person's face animate to a voiceover.
So I did this… and it’s not great. So, I’ve only used a small section in the film.
I did look into using AI generated music, but to-be-honest. Nothing I found was any good and a stock piano track had grown on me, so I stuck with that.
I wanted to keep the film light and manageable and step away from my predominant 3D workflow. However, once I had some of the portraits (at the end) move across the screen, I thought it be cool if some were 3D projected. It’s a very subtle effect, but you get to see each side of the faces as they move across.
At the time of posting this, more and more AI workflows have already arrived and we will continue to see an explosion of them.
The pressures on a motion designer to make more things, faster, better and cheaper is constant, and so too is the learning process.
So, no doubt to future proof myself within this industry, I must try to throw myself into this AI world.
Below are most of the images I ‘created’ in Midjourney. I wanted a mixed bag of sizes, styles and colours to get across this was a documented event from a nations viewpoint, rather than just the protagonist.
The quality of imagery that Midjourney creates is mind-blowing. It’s such a fun tool to experiment with. Being a motion designer whom has constantly been required to learn new tools over the years. I imagine this latest explosion of AI tools is just another set of these that I need to conquer and combine into my workflow.
