AI is here to stay and that’s a fact. Despite this, I have been resistant to using it in my filmmaking, because I really want to stick to making movies that are grounded in great performances, with naturalistic visuals. This is especially true of my latest project, Days with Dandekar, which I am working toward shooting at the end of this year.
Of course, even with a naturalistic, performance driven film, AI can be very useful in the pre-production process. I was thinking I’d shoot what I call “scene sketches,” or rough drafts of my scenes using my iPhone, to plan the blocking, an assignment I give students, but isn’t always easy or perfect for a lot of reasons.
Honestly, it is sometimes very hard to simulate locations and other elements, like say the type of Volvo I want in the story. I could work with a storyboard artist, which I have done before, but it’s a bit cost prohibitive at this stage.
Enter AI, and instead of me having to go out shoot something or work with an artist, I can simulate ideas in ways that are really helpful, as my husband has been trying to tell me forever now. For some time, I wasn’t exactly sure of what the best way of doing this was, but I started experimenting with different software programs I had heard about.
I played around with both Storyboard Hero and Storyboarder.ai. I found these tools to be well organized, and I plan to try using them again. But I didn’t love what I got, even after hours of work, as you can see with the image below. So ultimately, I got impatient, and ended up using ChatGPT, where I found my best outcomes. But it wasn’t super straightforward.
Why not? Well, for one, I could not just pop my script into ChatGPT gpt and get what I wanted. I typically write my screenplays using descriptive language like the opening of my story which says: “Sky meets freeway on an open road.” I go on to establish a 90’s Volvo and an older Indian man driving toward a corporate office park.
But when I first tried to just input the scenes into AI, it gave me some very fancy looking roads with fancy looking sunsets that looked waay over the top from the sparse, naturalistic vibe I wanted. It really wasn’t what I was going for at all.
I realized that I needed to just simplify, and make the wording very basic — like, older Indian man driving on a 2-lane freeway into corporate office park midday with wispy clouds. This yielded something better but not exactly in the tone or style I was aiming for. The image below is definitely not at all what I am going for and felt too comic book like. This was done in Storyboad Hero. I could have worked with it some more, but then I moved to ChatGPT.
My my husband who works in tech/AI, helped me re-word and re-design how I wrote my queries in ChatGPT, and I started to finally get somwhere. I added that I wanted a 16 X 9 frame and that I wanted it to feel naturalistic, like say the film Perfect Days. I also added lots of instructions on the direction of the car, the environment, and the size/shape of the shot.
It took many many tweaks, like an afternoon of work, but finally, after many adjustments, I got something much stronger and in the vein of what I was going for.
Now making adjustments and say, showing the same thing from a different framing or angle wasn’t super simple, but it did get better and better with trying more. Keeping the character consistent also isn’t totally possible in ChatGPT, but you can kind of play with it.
I have started playing with other scenes, and trying to really show how I am thinking they will look/flow and it is very helpful. Again, it takes a lot of prompting to get say, the body language correct, and the frame right and it isn’t perfect, but it’s really helpful, especially to give to my DP and producers.
What would be really cool if say AI technology could be integrated with say an app like Cadrage, where there are lenses and cameras to experiment with. But this process has actually be amazing bc it’s helping me to clarify and refine the vision, and make the film just a little more of a reality. I plan to keep going until I have a large chunk of the film done, and keep refining my vision along the way.