We made a film in collaboration with AI
AI is a huge opportunity for all creatives and filmmakers out there. That’s our view and we wanted to explore how to use it as it develops within our industry at a super-fast rate.
The team decided we should set a challenge, make an experimental advert using as many AI pieces of software as we possibly could.
We needed to pick a brand.
Brewdog was the choice. So a Reel Film production for a can of Brewdog in partnership with… erm…. AI.
We've wondered for a few months what role AI could play in productions, so here are the results and how we made it using a bunch of different tools.
Storyboarding, shot list and scripting - ChatGPT
Yep, that’s right, we told ChatGPT what our aim was, what we wanted to achieve and it was delivered. Well, kind of. The first draft was a million miles away from anything worth showing. But we persisted, prompted, promoted more and prompted even more. We got to a final storyboard we felt we could work with.
We then asked ChatGPT to turn that storyboard into a shot list which it duly did - quite impressively so too.
Finally, we asked it to apply a script using anything it can understand from Brewdog on the web. It wrote it up in an instant.
Having read the creative documents we generated a lit ourselves of the props and settings we would need - time for production!
Production - Reel Film
Production was still very much led by us. We used AI to inform what we were making but we still needed to operate the camera, direct the shoot and physically move the product around - taking reshooting where the first shot didn’t go quite right.
All creative direction though, we’ve got ChatGPT to thank for that.
Voiceover - Descript
After production, we had a voiceover generated on Descript. It’s rubbish. Learning to do there.
Main Edit - Reel Film
A bit like production, AI guided us through the edit but we had to do the leg work of putting the clips together, fine cutting it and making the finished piece with sound effects and graphics.
Colour Grade - RunWay
We used Runway (wow it’s amazing) to colour grade the footage and help us with rotoscoping and removing backgrounds. It’s mind-boggling.
Bear in mind, we did still have to colour-correct the footage.
And RunWay took about ten prompts to stop the footage from looking green (although that might be us).
So in short:
AI designed the storyboard
AI wrote the shot list
AI wrote the script
AI gave us direction on the props needed
Reel did the filming and production
AI did the voiceover
AI gave us direction on the music
Reel did the edit
AI colour graded it (yes, we know, wow)
Reel did the colour correction
Reel did the sound design
Our conclusion
We think it's amazing already (with plenty of prompts) but still has some work to do to match human standards in all areas. No doubt, we can harness the power of it now though for our clients for certain elements of the production process, right now mainly in Post-Production. What RunWay is doing is absolutely incredible and since writing this blog they’re released image to video creation (more on that soon).
What do you think of the results?
P.S. 10 points to the person who can spot the throwback to our super awful logo from 8 years ago
There was a lot of prompting.