Transcript: How a Hollywood Director Uses AI to Make Movies

The transcript of How Do You Use ChatGPT? with Dave Clark is below for paying subscribers.

This episode pairs well with my review of OpenAI’s new text-to-video model, Sora. In the piece, I cited Dave’s experience to argue that AI will change filmmaking by making movie concepts cheaper to test and big budget movies cost less, and leading to the emergence of a new art form. Here’s what I wrote:

“Dave Clark is a traditional filmmaker who has started to make AI-generated videos. He recently produced a sci-fi short called Borrowing Time that was inspired by his father’s experiences as a Black man in the 1960s. He produced it entirely using Midjourney and Runway to generate images and videos. He narrated the movie himself and used ElevenLabs to turn his voice acting into the voices of different characters. 

Borrowing Time went viral, and Dave told me he wouldn’t have been able to make it without AI. It would’ve been impossible to get a sci-fi short like his funded by a traditional Hollywood studio. But now that it’s out, and popular, he says that he’s fielding interest from top-tier Hollywood studios who would like to make it into a full-length movie. 

This anecdote speaks volumes about the way that AI models like Sora will change filmmaking in the future.”

Check out the full piece.

Timestamps:

1. Introduction 01:33
2. How AI is enabling everyone with a laptop to be a filmmaker 10:19
3. The new tool set for making AI films 14:30
4. How to make your AI-generated clips stand out 16:56
5. The first prompt in Dave’s custom text-to-image GPT for our movie 25:00
6. The big advantage text-to-image GPTs have over Midjourney 37:58
7. The best way to generate Midjourney prompts with a GPT 44:13
8. Animating the images for our movie in Runway 49:10
9. First look at our movie! 53:42
10. How Dave thinks about animating images without an obvious motion element 58:22
11. Why you need to be persistent while working with generative AI 59:46