Making a Short Story with AI

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Let’s get to today’s topic - How I made this.

This will be a long and comprehensive breakdown of my process. Strap in.

Videos and animations have long been my favorite format to create in. This is why I’m very excited AI can assist in my creation process more and more.

As usual, my thought process is to use AI to take over the tasks needed to make my final product. I am the creative director and I have several powerful assistants within hands reach, waiting to help me.

So I start with the script.

I want to make a short story about a tea ceremony - I love tea. 🍵

I go to Claude and ask him for help with this task.

His answers are not what I’m looking for, so I give him some more guidance.

And he delivers.

This already takes me on a mental journey. I can see the images and feel the atmosphere of the video in my mind. I can keep refining this vision further, but for this example, I’m happy with the current script.

The next step is getting the visuals. I’ll ask for Claude help again.

I get ideas for some shots.

I can dive deeper into individual scenes and ideate further.

This is a part of the process I enjoy - connecting words and scenes to images and motion. So I take the suggestions Claude offers and travel into my own world of visuals.

To generate the images, I used Stable Diffusion. You might have seen some of the images in my weekly gallery.

Parallel to making the images, I started animating them.

I uploaded the individual images to PikaLabs and added simple prompts to them, saying what I want to see moving.

I used the parameter --motion 2 for more motion in the image.

On occasion I also used the parameter --neg “hands, people” to remove elements from my scenes.

Parallel, PARALLEL to making images and animations, I’ve also made the music.

This is the beauty of AI for me. I can make images, animations, and music all at the same time. I know the tasks needed to be done and I put an assistant onto each of these tasks.

I tried different music generators and ended up using Boomy.

The controls are very simple, which can be also very limiting if you want something very very specific.

Along with the music I need a voiceover as well.

I go into Elevenlabs and copy the script Claude gave me to generate a voiceover.

NOW

I have everything I need to make my video.

Editing and putting the story together is another thing I enjoy, so I go into Davinci Resolve and add everything together.

I end up adding some sound effects from Freesound, as sounds make an emotional connection for the viewer.

Here is the final result once again:

I’ve always loved being the creative director. I understand what goes into making a story - specifically a video story - and having assistants available to help me, makes my creation process so much easier and fun. I can come up with ideas and different worlds and distribute tasks to these assistants.

It’s a really REALLY exciting time to be a creator. I’m happy to be sharing this time with all of you.

I hope you’ve enjoyed following the process breakdown in today’s post. It was a long one.

I also hope it inspires you to try it out for yourself and make one of your stories a reality.

You can stop by my website or social media and as always,

Keep creating and don't forget to have fun. ☀