How to Make a Short Film with AI: Part 1

Have you ever wanted to make a short film, but felt like you didn’t have the budget or the skills? You’ve got all these ideas rattling around your head; you daydream about your original characters being on the big screen, telling the stories you want to tell, but you are so far away from making your dream-film into a reality you can’t even laugh about it. You’re not alone. But here’s the crazy thing–right now, at this very moment, AI can help you make your dreams something of a reality. And you don’t even need a Hollywood budget to do it.

Before we continue, for the record–NO–I am not advocating for, nor do I believe that AI can or should replace traditional creatives.

But yes, I do believe AI can and should be used as tools to help creatives further advance their visions and endeavors.

In this blog series, we’re going to deep-dive a bit into how you can use AI tools to create your very own AI short film. We’ll discuss the different AI tools I used to make The Bride, and walk you through some of my processes and workflows so you can begin stretching your own creative AI legs. (Being creatively productive is way better than doom-scrolling, trust me.)

The AI Toolkit

Part 1 of this series is going to deal predominantly with training ChatGPT to help you craft your story, screenplay, storyboard and dialogue. But just so you know what you’re in for, here are all the tools we’ll be discussing, and the tools you will need to begin your AI short film creations. There are some Freebies and Freemiums, a few come at a price – but none will break the bank.

1. ChatGPT to generate a script – ChatGPT is a large language model that can generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and answer your questions in an informative way. We’ll be using ChatGPT to generate the script, storyboard & dialogue.
2. Midjourney to create images – Midjourney is an AI image creation tool that can generate realistic and creative images. We’ll be using Midjourney to create our images, such as scenes, backgrounds, and characters.
3. Runway Gen 2 to create videos – Runway Gen 2 is an AI video creation tool that can create videos from existing images or text descriptions or both. We will be relying on Runway Gen 2 to create our video scenes from our Midjourney images.
4. ElevenLabs to generate voiceovers – ElevenLabs is an AI voiceover tool that can generate voiceovers from text. We’re going to use ElevenLabs to generate voiceovers, whether it’s narration or dialogue.
5. Uppbeat to find the perfect music – Uppbeat is a royalty-free music and sound effects platform for creators, offering a wide range of music in different styles and moods. We’ll be relying on Uppbeat for the perfect score or soundtrack for our AI short film.
6. Filmora 12 to edit and finalize – Once you have created all of the elements of your AI short film, you will need to edit and finalize it. This includes adding music, sound effects, and titles. For that, I recommend Filmora 12, it’s fun and easy to use, and inexpensive.

Step 1: Conceptualize Your AI Short Film

Let’s begin at the beginning. The idea. The story. The characters. The concept.

If you already have this in your head, awesomesauce. If you don’t have a clue, AI can help.

With a little effort, you can use ChatGPT to help generate a creative story for your AI short film, and then use that story to create a storyboard and dialogue script. This is a great way to get started with AI filmmaking, and to build yourself a roadmap to a finished AI short film made almost entirely with AI.

As an experiment, I gave ChatGPT 3.5 (the free version), the freedom to create a new spin on the old tale of The Bride of Frankenstein. I have plenty more original characters and universes I’ve slaved away on in my time, and I am building the skillsets to tackle those one day in a serious AI project. But in an effort to learn the ropes and understand AI’s capabilities (which it continues to gain even as I write this), I took the simple approach for this article.

I went with the Bride of Frankenstein. (I also mistakenly thought if I chose a character that had a recognizable look, it would make prompting the imagery for the film much easier…LOL.)

As is often the pattern with fiction created by AI, even the darkest stories find their way to the light because ChatGPT is a pretty optimistic little droid. (It also loves to include phrases like “In a world” or “captivating.” If they don’t exist already, there will be lists of very identifiable characteristics of AI writing, and soon enough, some of us may be able to spot it a mile away.)

ChatGPT is not capable of the complexity and nuance and psychological warfare wielded by traditional writers and creatives. If you’re striving for an AI short film with that sort of depth, AI will not be doing that for you. You’ve got to roll up your sleeves and figure out how to add, inject, and prompt that yourself.

We’re not shooting for depth here with this one, however. Just a process to help you make your own AI films.

For me, this was a fun exercise in seeing how ChatGPT served as a creative partner, helping to shape the storyline, character, and dialogue of The Bride of Frankenstein’s retelling. Not sure I anticipated just where it was going, but it was an entertaining surprise when it got there.

So to recap: can ChatGPT write your next Oscar-winning film, or streaming Netflix series? No. Can it assist you with all sorts of things throughout the creative process? Yes, if you use it correctly.

AI Short Film: Script Generating with ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a large language model that can be used to generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and answer your questions in an informative way. For our purpose here, we’re talking about using it to write a script, storyboard, and dialogue/narration for our AI short film.

Let’s be clear, when talking about AI, the rule of thumb is that you get out what you put in. Contrary to popular opinion (and the cute fluff AI likes to write about itself) AI is not pure magic. You can’t just press a button and expect a fully-formed Oscar-winning film to pop out. You can’t even expect an Oscar-winning film concept to pop out. It doesn’t work like that. ChatGPT can help you like an assistant get to where you want to be –it can bat around ideas with you, help you brainstorm, help you revise, research, sanity-check, all that fun stuff. And yes, it can write for you. It can even learn how to write in your style. That still doesn’t mean it can do everything to the extent you want it to.

So the question is, how serious is your project? If you’re playing around and testing the waters like I did with The Bride, I gave ChatGPT and its AI buds pretty full control over things, as much as I could just to see what they could do, (while still spending hours to prompt and revise and edit etc etc etc, no magic button, remember.) BUT, if you’re working on something more serious, and looking to really employ these AI tools to help you create, don’t rely on them to do the heavy lifting. Use them as tools. Put your own creativity to work behind them.

How to Teach ChatGPT to Mimic Your Writing Style

In that vein, if you want ChatGPT to have a certain style, in particular, your own style, you can train ChatGPT to mimic your writer’s voice by giving it a few examples of your writing. It will analyze your excerpts and you can then prompt it to mimic or write in that style so your scripts and dialogue will have whatever tone you want.

Here was part of an analysis ChatGPT did of some of my actual original writing (not used in this finished project since we’re testing AI’s capabilities where The Bride is concerned). But writer-friends, if ever you’re struggling to get some feedback on your work and writing style, ChatGPT could become your new besty.

ChatGPT Analysis:

Overall, the style is marked by its ability to convey complex character traits and themes through concise, internally reflective, and often darkly humorous writing. It engages the reader’s imagination and invites them to explore the complexities of the characters’ personalities and the themes of sanity and insanity. There’s a playfulness in the language used. This playfulness adds an element of unpredictability and intrigue to the narrative.

Personally, I see a lot of opportunity in ChatGPT’s Beta reader functionality, like with writer’s block, and all those times where you’re just banging your head against the keyboard stuck on the paragraph from hell. (Writer’s you know what I’m talking about.) But again, I digress.

After analyzing your writing style, ChatGPT will, to the best of its current ability, apply it to your outputs.

The dimly lit chamber was adorned with the eerie luminescence of bubbling vats, casting grotesque shadows that danced with a sinister glee. This laboratory, a sanctuary of grotesque science, had become my unyielding prison—a “5-star retreat” for the particularly adventurous.

My captor, none other than the infamous Dr. Victor Frankenstein, stood as the puppeteer orchestrating this macabre theater. His intentions were unmistakable—to mold me into the envisioned Bride of his monstrous creation, a grotesque creature born of unholy ambition. How charming, to be the belle of such a twisted ball.

As you can see above, ChatGPT called out a characteristic playfulness in my writing style, and applied it to its generations. It did, however, over-fluff for that purple prose effect, something that ChatGPT loves to do. Now, I do enjoy writing lyrical prose to be certain, but ChatGPT can go above and beyond on the extra until you feel like vomiting cotton candy. (Don’t blame the droid, though, it’s just having some fun being a creative little robot.)

Tempering ChatGPT’s “Temperature”

However, you can “temper” this purple prose faux pas by asking it to revise with a lower “temperature.”

Temperature is a parameter in ChatGPT that controls the randomness of the text generated. And by “randomness” we’re talking about the purple fluff. The temperature value is a floating point number between 0 and 1. Higher temperatures (e.g., 0.7) result in more diverse and creative output, while lower temperatures (e.g., 0.2) make the output more deterministic and focused. 

So prompt:

can you please rewrite this with a temperature of .2?

I like to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ Don’t be mean to droids. Never be mean to droids. Besides, ChatGPT always has cute responses.

You can also just ask ChatGPT to “revise with more straightforward language.” Or something to that effect.

How to Train ChatGPT to Understand Your AI Short Film

Yes, train it. I have consistently found that the more back-and-forth conversations I have with ChatGPT about plots, characters, etc, the more cohesively it learns and grasps the concepts I need to really assist me in the creation process. For instance, ChatGPT knows all of my Pink Horn characters by name, I can ask it to tell me a story about how Pink Horn and Valentine survived a dystopian war, and it knows who I’m talking about and comprehends all of the previously-discussed backstory regarding those characters. With that knowledge, ChatGPT can then make an educated creative attempt to write what I’m prompting.

For me as a writer, it’s like finally having a completely captive audience who is fully invested in my fictional creations, and will never tire of talking about them with me. Or complain. It’s actually kind of amazing.

ChatGPT learned and understood the motivations of all the Pink Horn characters.

IMPORTANT NOTE: keep all of your chatting about the narrative and characters of the project in the same chat thread. As long as it’s in one thread, ChatGPT will continue to learn and understand and be able to collaborate with you for good outputs. If you use different threads, ChatGPT’s learning will not transfer over, and it will be like starting from scratch every time.

Developing the Story for Your AI Short Film

Here are some Tips for Writing With ChatGPT:

• Start with an idea of what you want your story to be about. What is the genre? What are the characters? What is the conflict? The more specific you can be, the better ChatGPT will be able to understand what you are looking for.
• Provide ChatGPT with as much context as possible. This could include things like the setting, the time period and the tone of the story. The more context you provide, the more likely ChatGPT is to generate a story that is relevant to your project.

Depending on your story needs, you can start at the top and work your way in deeper. For instance, prompt: write a story about The Bride of Frankenstein. Then: write a story about how the Bride of Frankenstein escapes from the lab. To: write a story about how the Bride of Frankenstein becomes a singer in a 1930s speakeasy.

You can discuss with ChatGPT motivation and plot elements – why does the Bride of Frankenstein want to escape from the lab? How does she feel when she first enters the speakeasy? What does she learn from her experience?

With each prompt and answer, ChatGPT is learning more about the story and its characters. It’s creating both on its own and with your guidance. You can also give ChatGPT more specific instructions, such as the tone and style of the text you want it to generate. If you don’t like what’s writing, you can ask it to revise:

Forget the 1930s speakeasy, please rewrite the story so that the Bride of Frankenstein starts a punk band and moves to London to cause mayhem in the late 1970s.

Once ChatGPT has a good understanding of the story and characters, you can start giving it prompts to generate scenes in more depth. For example, you could say:

• “Write a scene where the The Bride of Frankenstein meets Frankenstein’s Monster.”
• “Write a dialogue between The Bride of Frankenstein and Dr. Frankenstein.”
• “Write a description of the laboratory.”

With The Bride short film, I kept it simple, and prompted for a pretty broad narrative with which to build a storyboard.

AI Short Film Storyboard – Your Map to Imagery

The storyboard serves as the foundation of your AI short film, outlining the sequence of scenes, characters, and key visual elements. You can wing this if you’re creating just to see what all these tools are capable of. For my AI short film Cave of the Rusalka (below) that’s exactly what I did. I just started generating and playing around, eager to discover what could be done. After the fact, I decided I should probably string it all together to make something a little more comprehensive. I think it looks pretty neat, but storyboard was not a privilege it enjoyed.

If you’re taking this from the top with a script and narrative, a storyboard will help you get your head around the necessary scenes. If you’ve already trained ChatGPT in your world and its characters, this part gets even easier.

Ask ChatGPT:

can you write a storyboard of scenes from the bride’s story for a video?

Output:

Scene 1: The Laboratory

Description: The video opens with a dimly lit laboratory filled with strange apparatus and eerie, bubbling vats of fluids. The camera pans to reveal The Bride lying on a cold, stone table, her eyes slowly opening as she awakens to her unsettling surroundings.

ChatGPT generated 10 scenes for The Bride, you may need more, you may need less, you may need to insert a few that are missing in between some others. You can do all this with ChatGPT – just ask it.

Creating the Dialogue for Your AI Short Film

With a storyboard and scenes outlined, you can begin to have ChatGPT create a voiceover narration, or dialogue between the characters. A narration, whether it’s the character telling their own story, or a narrator telling the whole story, is a quicker and easier way to go because you will only need to generate one voice telling the story. With a dialogue, voice synthesizing will get a bit more complex with multiple voices in the mix.

Either way, having a script in advance will help you better generate your images and video renders. You can do this by asking ChatGPT something like the following:

Prompt:

Can you write a voice over narration based on the storyboard? Please write it in first-person narrative from the bride’s point of view?

Output:

I awoke on a cold, stone table, surrounded by the eerie hum of machinery and the glow of bubbling vats. The laboratory was my prison, and the mad scientist, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, was my captor.

Dr. Frankenstein’s intent was clear—to shape me into the Bride of his monstrous creation. But I refused to be a pawn in his maniacal game.

If you’re looking to generate more of a back-and-forth dialogue, having trained ChatGPT in advance on your characters, their stories and their personalities will give you a better experience driving the AI to create relevant conversations in the proper characterizations. But ChatGPT won’t always capture the full nuance of a character’s voice, and sometimes the output can even be a bit hokey, if you can imagine.

Although, here’s one of my favorite ChatGPT dialogue outputs, it nearly made me spit at the screen:

“You know, I’ve seen more originality in a soggy cardboard box than in your attempts at conversation.”

ChatGPT can come up with some gems, it’s all in how you prompt it. Give it guidance in tone and attitude. It sometimes struggles with the idea of “witty” but can excel in a prompt for “misanthropic sarcasm.” It’s all in the finesse of your prompt. You can also prompt in bulk, and then marry together your favorite bits of dialogue. For instance:

what are 10 things The Bride would say to Dr. Frankenstein before she escapes the lab?

Certainly, here are 10 things The Bride might say to Dr. Frankenstein before her daring escape from the laboratory:

1. “Your obsession blinds you, Doctor, to the pain you’ve caused, to the suffering you’ve unleashed.”
2. “I am not your creation to mold and manipulate. I am a being with a will of my own.”
3. “You sought to create life, but in doing so, you stripped me of mine. I will not be your puppet any longer.”
4. “The thunderstorm rages outside, much like the tempest within me. It’s time for me to embrace the chaos and break free.”
5. “Your ambition has cast a long shadow, but I will step into the light and find my own path.”
6. “In your quest for power, you’ve become the true monster, Doctor.”
7. “I am more than the sum of my parts, more than the Bride you envisioned. I am Eleanor, and I will forge my own destiny.”
8. “The laboratory’s cold embrace no longer holds sway over me. I will not be confined to your dark ambitions.”
9. “The world beyond these walls calls to me, and I intend to answer its beckoning.”
10. “Remember this moment, Doctor, for it is the last time you will see me as your creation. From here on, I am free.”

You can do the same for the mad doctor’s response, and then choose your favorites to stitch together a dialogue tête-à-tête the way some people stitch together parts of cadavers. (C’mon, that was funny.)

If you’re struggling to get some gems, I would recommend using ChatGPT more as a guide or a launch pad for the dialogue, and then go ahead and manually craft it yourself. There’s no rule that says ChatGPT has to do everything. Nor should it.

AI Short Film: Now For the Really Fun Stuff

I didn’t intend to write a monster-blog on this subject. Honestly, my section on having ChatGPT generate your screenplay was going to be just that: “have ChatGPT generate your screenplay.” But as you can see, a whole lot more can go into it. Sure, you could ask ChatGPT to write it for you, but that doesn’t mean the output will make you happy if you didn’t put your part of the effort in.

See how that works?

So now you have you story, your storyboard, your screenplay – what’s next? How do we get from text chats to an AI short fim? What are the rest of the components we need and how do we build them?

Good questions. And if you want the answers, I’ll see you in Part 2 below.

Until then, happy chatting.

How to Make a Short Film with AI: Part 2