I Created An AI Generated Movie Trailer (For A Movie That Doesn’t Exist)

Introducing the #AISummer2023 series, a continuation of the original #30DayAIChallenge in Spring. As the field of AI evolves, this series delves deeper into the latest advancements in AI tools and capabilities. It represents not just my practical tinkering over the Summer, but a metaphorical ‘summer’ of AI growth and evolution.

I’ve always loved movie trailers…crafting an amazing trailer without giving too much away takes a fair bit or art and skill. Some of the best movie trailers that come to mind are the original Alien movie, Inception, Max Max: Fury Road, The Dark Knight, Psycho and many, many more.

To test just how far AI capabilities have gotten, I decided to try my hand at my very first movie trailer, for a (non-existent) movie called “Algorithmic Overload“. Now, to be fair, the final product reflects both current AI capabilities as well as my amateur skills as an editor, so let the latter not reflect on the former too harshly.

Here’s the final product:

How I Did It

The process was fairly straightforward, though not without its challenges. Here are the various tools and sources used:

• Scriptwriting – The first thing I did was brainstormed a few ideas using ChatGPT, leveraging the key elements found in great movie trailers. We bounced about a dozen ideas around…initially I wanted to go down the Horror / Sci-Fi route, but settled on Dark Comedy instead.
• Visuals – The base visuals were all created on MidJourney and the quality, as usual, was excellent. I then took these and used the “Image to Video” tool on RunwayML, which basically animates the stills…this was probably the weakest point in terms of output quality. While the tool can generate up to 4 seconds of video, the quality is pretty basic at the moment, with plenty of unintended distortions. I think we’ll see improvements pretty rapidly in the months ahead though, just as we did with MidJourney not so long ago.
• Sound – I used ElevenLabs for the narrations…this tool, as you’ve seen from my past experiments, is pretty incredible and currently also features an extensive library of community created voices. Sound effects were sourced from Final Cut Pro X as well as from Pixabay.
• Editing – I used my favourite go-to video editor, Final Cut Pro X…though pretty much any video editing tool would work equally well. I’m not an expert at using FCPX but keep learning more with every iteration. I’m sure those with extensive editing or trailer-making experience could have found some more interesting approaches (if you’re one of them, please drop me a note with your tips and recommendations!)

That’s pretty much it…the whole process was fairly easy, save for the editing, which can take up some time depending on how much care and attention you put into it. Let me know what you think! It is still early days as far as AI generated video goes…I bet that in a year or two from now, the quality we’ll be able to produce will blow us all away. Can’t wait!