Behind the Scenes

No. Maintaining shot continuity and creating a consistent look within the world of "The Frost" was crucial for achieving our artistic vision. To navigate this process, we employed a diverse range of prompts, from minimal to extremely specific, tailored to address the unique challenges presented by each shot. Striking a balance between granting DALL·E 2 the artistic freedom to work its magic and providing precise guidance regarding lens type, camera position, and directorial tone enabled us to craft a visually cohesive and immersive experience shot-to-shot.

Although the current narrative around AI tends to be something like, “I made a whole thing by myself in a few hours,” a lot of this is still good old fashioned human effort that took hundreds of hours to produce with a team of mostly 7 people (Director, Editor, Production Design, Dalle artists, and an animator)

We used D-ID. The tech is mostly known for driving the live portraits feature within the MyHeritage app, bringing old photos to life. Like a few other AI creatives in the space, we discovered the technology could be leveraged for a multitude of innovative applications.

Continuity and Tone: One of our greatest challenges was maintaining shot continuity and conveying emotions while working with AI. In traditional filmmaking, a simple conversation between two characters is relatively easy. However, with AI, it took countless attempts and trial and error before we could capture emotions like fear, terror, sadness, hopelessness, and elation in our characters while ensuring they interacted convincingly.

Animating Still Imagery: Although Dall-E provided stunning visuals, we needed to breathe life into these images. We used D-ID to make our characters speak and Mixamo 3D characters for movement, particularly during walking scenes. Our aim was to preserve the AI-generated image's integrity while enhancing the story and immersing the audience in the world of 'The Frost.’

Embracing the Unexpected: Initially, we found it challenging to let go of preconceived ideas of what a shot should look like. With AI imagery, we had to be open to new possibilities presented by the AI. While we had to 'wrestle' with the AI for specific shots and continuity, learning to embrace what the AI showed us was a novel experience that ultimately proved rewarding.

AI Imagery Inspiration: We were all honestly blown away by how inspiring it was to work with AI-generated visuals. It was like opening up a whole new world of possibilities and discovering creative ideas we might never have thought of on our own.

Storytelling Hurdles: Building a solid narrative using AI imagery as our base was trickier than we expected. It was incredibly challenging to weave a simple story while integrating the AI’s visuals into our movie.

Human-AI Teamwork: What also caught us off guard was how much the AI still needed our input to get our ideas just right. Even though AI brings a ton of creative potential, it became clear that magic happens when humans and AI work together to bring a vision to life.