How We Used AI to Finish our Short Film on a Budget
The topic of artificial intelligence in the creative space is a hot and messy one. Some recognize AI generative tools such as ChatGPT as an unstoppable force of the future which will help make creative processes more efficient and cost effective. Others believe that AI is and will continue to leave a negative footprint in fields such as film, writing, art, music and videogames, snatching jobs away from humans who are willing to do the work and in some cases stealing existing work from artists. Heading into the production of our second short film, “Midnight 2: Born Ruthless,” my opinion on the subject was somewhere in the middle. While the usefulness of AI cannot be denied, we clearly also don’t want to see creative people put out of work. This article isn’t about the morality of AI, however. It’s about the very real production and budget challenges that we were faced and overcame while filming and editing Midnight 2 and how we used AI to solve those problems.
Before I break down which AI tools we utilized and what we used them for, let me explain our style of film making. Our cast and crew are a small group of creators in Upstate New York who are all friends or relatives of some kind. While I wrote the script for Midnight 2, many of the actors and people who contributed to the film (27-minutes in length in total) are people who all worked on the project because they know me personally, saw it as an opportunity, liked the idea for the film and what we were creating or just enjoy the process of film making in general. From writing, acting, camera operation, editing, scoring, stunts and visual effects, we made this film without paying anyone because we just don’t have the money to do so.
We utilized the newest iPhone Pro Max as our camera and pooled together things that we already own for costumes, props and weapons. We may or may not have trespassed in order to get access to certain sets. While we are extremely proud of what we created in Born Ruthless, to say that it is “low budget” would be an understatement. That adjective isn’t an insult in this case (nor should it ever be), its a description. We are regular working people with full time jobs, mortgages and car payments who lack additional income to invest in film making. But we still have the burning desire to create. In order to make Midnight 2: Born Ruthless a reality, we utilized every single thing at our disposal. And in a few select cases, that meant artificial intelligence tools.
- Storyboarding via Midjourney
Given that we are a small group with a limited budget and lack a crew member who is skilled in drawing, we utilized Midjourney early on in the writing and scripting process to generated images of what we were hoping to capture in various scenes and shots while filming. From the inception of writing to wrapping filming, Midnight 2 took about one year of work to complete. Anyone who has ever made a film or short film knows that you can’t rely on just memory or instinct when you get to a location and set. You have to have a plan. When creating a short film, there’s so much happening on the set that you need every tool that you can get to keep everyone on task, organized and moving along together as a group. On Hollywood film sets, there are countless people paid to perform every little job. But when you’re making an independent short film, the folks that you have working with you kind of have to do everything.
Within our script, we included storyboard images generated with Midjourey to remind ourselves what we intend a given scene, shot or camera angle to look like. The image above is one of the examples of one of our storyboards created with Midjourney compared to a still from Born Ruthless.
Utilizing Midjourney for the storyboarding process helped us save both time and money during the writing and conceptualization phase of production and filming process. The reality is that if we had to pay an artist to create storyboards for us, we would have had to come up with a ton more money that we didn’t have and/or just not have storyboards to utilize at all, which would have made the filming process more challenging and likely yielded a lesser short film. We used a tool available to us (Midjourney) to ensure thatwe fleshed out various visual ideas and angles for scenes and had a visual reminder of what we were aiming for.
In the end, Midjourney cost us about $10 a month. While it would have been great to partner with a killer artist for storyboarding, it wouldn’t have been possible on our budget and timeline.
2. Music with Suno.com
Before I go any further, I want to be clear that the overwhelming majority of the music in Midnight 2: Born Ruthless was created and recorded by human artists. We had the privilege of working with DEADROP Variants MetaMora, William Morris and DMSDrums, who composed original tracks heard throughout Midnight 2. We also partnered with SxccxibiStxnger, a known Argent Metal artist to utilize some of his existing music created for a DOOM mod, in the film. With that said, what do you do when you wrap filming, you’re on a tight timeline and don’t have money to pay for more music to be composed? We turned to Suno.
There is a scene in Midnight 2 that called for the use of a rap or hip hop track that features members of the film’s Animal-themed gang. They’re packed into a vehicle and listening to music. Since the rest of the music in Midnight 2 is far from rap, we used Suno to compose a rap song that fit the scene and featured lyrics about the universe that the characters inhabit. Its only briefly in the film as the track is shut off by the characters in the scene after a brief time but it works perfectly for the scene and added a level of grime to the characters as they are introduced.
It goes without saying that we couldn’t afford to license an existing rap song. And while there are libraries of copyright free music online these days, it simply made more sense for us to create something of our own using Suno rather than sift through thousands of copyright free songs online until we found the right fit, in this case. Especially when many copyright free songs still trigger copyright claims and monetization problems on YouTube.
3. Poster via Midjourney and Photoshop
We originally intended to work with an artist on the official poster for Midnight 2: Born Ruthless just as we did with the original. We were very excited about the concept and the artists’ previous work. As it sometimes does, life took some twists and turns and the artist that we were engaged with was unable to move forward with the poster. We put out calls for a new artist and went so far as to get quotes from known artists that I follow on various social media platforms and Fiverr. On the low side, we would likely have had to pay somewhere around $200 for the poster, without a real guarantee of quality. If we wanted to partner with someone who we could have banked on, it would have put us somewhere around $750-$1500, bearing in mind that we had just wrapped filming and spent a lot of our own money making the film itself. If you’ve ever made a short film or any kind, you know that costs add up quickly.
This is when I started using Midjourney to generate various elements of one of the poster concepts that I had in mind with a comic book like style. Through hundreds of variations of the characters and comic book styles, I eventually came up with the pieces that I needed. I then utilized my High School class level Photoshop skills to piece together five different Midjourney images before adding the logos and text that you see above to yield the final poster. We used this same method to create several other poster variants but we went with the image above as the official poster which coincidentally also took the most work on my part.
In the end, the use of artificial intelligence tools throughout the production of Midnight 2: Born Ruthless helped make our film possible by saving us time and money. We used AI tools to fill gaps and perform tasks that we lacked the time, money, resources and equipment to execute. Creating a film of any kind isn’t easy. This one took over a year from start to finish. But I believe that when utilized correctly, AI absolutely enables people to create things that they weren’t able to just a few years ago. I’m proud of the film that we made and the fact that we utilized everything at our disposal to make it the best that it could be. Times are changing and independent creators of all kinds are competing with the big leagues for people’s attention. Artists shouldn’t be afraid or ashamed to use the tools available to them to bring their dreams to life and share them with the world.
Midnight 2: Born Ruthless will premiere before the end of 2024 and will be available for free on YouTube. If you’d like to support our future productions, find us on Patreon.
DEADROP and all of its characters are owned by Midnight Society.
