• Overview
While in the process of developing my After Effects & motion graphics skills, I created a music video for a song I had produced a few years prior. I used the AI tool MidJourney to generate the raw images.
Role
Concept, Storyboard, Prompt generation, motion animation
Timeframe
10 weeks // 50 hours
Spring 2023
Spring 2023
Collaborators
Solo
Tools
Photoshop, After Effects, MidJourney, Procreate
Client
School Project
• Process
Storyboarding
I always had this vague image in my head of some guy in a spaceship rocketing through space so I began storyboarding the shots.
MidJourney AI
Originally, I was going to use a found/paper cutout style for the images and animate them.
However, with the rise in popularity of AI image generation, I thought this could be a good opportunity to learn how to wrangle these wild new tools.
So I began experimenting with AI prompts to "Art Direct" the scenes I was looking to create. I decided to keep everything black and white in an attempt to maintain some continuity since I wasn't sure how consistent AI was going to be.
I quickly realized that there were going to be some real challenges with AI. Though it can rapidly generate images, getting to give me the right "camera" angles and visual treatments would take some more curation and creative prompt engineering.
In total, I generated over 800 images. However, only 5-10% of the images generated were viable. This success rate improved with better prompts and with the rapid advancement of the technology itself.
MidJourney wants to faces on everything
Even animal faces
This was my attempt at generating a hand pointing the index finger
The global prompt group that helped me create consistency was:
(Futuristic, Comic book, black and white)
(Futuristic, Comic book, black and white)
Photoshop
Where AI fell short I was able to make up for it with Photoshop.
For Example, These two images were brought into Photoshop and........
.....Turned into this
Once I had all the scenes I could finally bring them Into After Effects and start animating.
Final Thoughts
While this project was intended to be an exploration of After Effects, I would say I spent at least half of the time in MidJourney generating images. I learned a lot about both tools. I'll be diving deeper into After Effects, but as far as AI tools are concerned, I've found more practical use out of Chat GPT than the image generators. However, with the pace AI technology is advancing I could see that changing.
