I embarked on an intriguing project: creating a movie trailer for a fictional film using various AI tools available today. My goal was to see how difficult it would be to quickly produce a visually appealing, coherent trailer for an imaginary movie.
In this article, I’ll unveil the video and detail the process of crafting an AI-generated movie trailer. As a blogger with little experience generating video clips, it took me about 3 hours to produce a 45-second trailer.
Keep reading to check out the final product and learn how I put it all together. You will see that you, too, can likely easily do something similar!
AI-Generated Movie Trailer for “Echoes of Tomorrow”
The end result: my movie trailer for the imaginary film entitled “Echoes of Tomorrow” can be seen here:
AI Tools I used:
My Processes for Making This Movie Trailer
In order to create the movie, I used a variety of tools, and assembled everything in iMovie.
ChatGPT for Concept and Writing
I started out using ChatGPT to generate the basic concept of the movie trailer. I suggested something science fiction or fantasy, as I thought that would work best with Pika.art’s image animation capabilities.
ChatGPT responded with a storyboard set of about 8 scenes, with brief descriptions of each scene in the list.
Midjourney for Image Generation
For each of the shots in the trailer, I wanted to start with a basic image that I could feed into Pika.art to create an animation. I fed the description from ChatGPT, along with some modifications, into Midjourney v6, and it produced the basic images I was looking for.
Sometimes I needed to run it through multiple times to get an image I was satisfied with. Midjourney still struggles with consistent characters (you can do them to some degree, but it’s a pain), so I tried to avoid that with this trailer.
Pika.art for Image Animation
Once I generated each of the still images for each shot in the scene, I brought those into Pika.art to make the animations. Pika allows you to upload a source image and also to describe what you would like to have happen in the animation.
It works wonderfully well, especially for a free tool (at least for now), but sometimes you have to run it multiple times to get something you like.
It’s also very nice that you can easily add additional time to a specific shot in order to lengthen the clip.
Suno.ai for the Background Music
Once I had the trailer shots complete, I needed an appropriate soundtrack. I used Suno.ai to generate a film soundtrack song, though it took me a few times. Suno kept wanting to add vocals to the track or wanted to make it sound to uplifting.
Eventually, though, I was able to get a suitable soundtrack.
ElevenLabs for the Voiceover
I fed the voiceover track that ChatGPT generated for me into Elevenlabs, using the default “Josh” voice, to produce the speech.
Putting it Together
I uploaded all of these pieces into iMovie, and used some of the simple fade and transitions to make it feel natural. I had to split up the audio track so that it (sorta) aligned with the appropriate scenes in the video, but otherwise it was all pretty easy.
Trailer complete!
Conclusion
I have very little experience with video, and have not really used iMovie or any of the more powerful video editors out there. I was able to assemble a reasonable trailer in about 2-3 hours. It’s amazing how easy these tools are to work with, and the potential they hold is great!
For more fun inspiring AI generated art, see:
