Chris Hogg, who lectures Creative & Social Media at Royal Holloway, invited me to come and do a workshop with his multimedia students on using generative AI for creative storytelling. Also in the room was Professor David Howard, who’s known for recreating the voice of a 3,000 year old mummified Egyptian priest. He becomes important later.
I called the talk “Cinematic Synthesis: Generative AI in Creative Storytelling”. The plan was to show the students how AI image generation, voice cloning, and 3D content creation works, and then get them to make a short movie trailer using it all. Whole thing in one afternoon.
The Tools
Started with Midjourney. Even compared to a year ago the quality has jumped massively. We looked at how prompt engineering works and how small changes in wording completely change what you get out.
Then we got into 3D stuff. NERFs for turning photos into 3D models, Move.ai for motion capture without a suit, and Wonder Dynamics which swaps a real actor for a CG character in footage. We also looked at AI video generation which is honestly still a mess right now but improving fast.
The Workshop
The students had four hours to make trailers for whatever film they wanted. I was using ChatGPT throughout to generate ideas, plot outlines, shotlists, that kind of thing.
Four hours isn’t long but the output was genuinely impressive. Some of these students had never used any of these tools before that morning and by the afternoon they had actual short films.
The Mummy
The professors made their own team. Obviously their film was about the mummy. Professor Howard and Chris Hogg ended up making this horror trailer that was properly unsettling. Something quite funny about the academics producing the creepiest thing of the day.
Takeaway
The main thing I took from it was how quickly everyone picked the tools up. These students went from zero to making films in an afternoon. The barrier to making this kind of content is basically gone now. What’s still hard is knowing what to make and why it matters, which is the bit that can’t really be automated.
Cheers to Chris Hogg for having me, the students for getting stuck in, and the professors for the mummy content.