How a Hollywood Director Uses AI to Make Movies - Ep. 12 with Dave Clark

You can break into Hollywood with a movie you made alone in your room.

Dave Clark can show you exactly how in < 60 minutes. He’s a film director with a body of work that includes both feature films and commercials for brands like Google. His latest achievement is a stunning sci-fi short that got Hollywood’s attention, one that Dave made exclusively using AI.

Dave and I make a movie live on this episode, iterating from rough ideas to a real motion picture in < 1 hour. It’s a noir short featuring Nicolas Cage using a haunted roulette ball to resurrect his dead movie career that you don’t want to miss.

We dive deep into the world of AI tools for image and video generation, specifically exploring their implications on lowering the barriers to enter the traditional movie industry. This episode is also packed with Dave’s wisdom on how to use these tools to create mind-bending movies.

We get into:

• How AI is enabling everyone with a laptop to be a filmmaker
• Actionable tips to 10x your use of creative AI tools like Midjourney, Runway, and Elevenlabs
• How to integrate ChatGPT into the process to craft compelling stories
• Strategies to make your AI-generated clips stand out
• How to leverage AI tools to refine your videos

This episode is a must-watch for creative people interested in bringing their stories to life, movie buffs, and anyone curious about the future of creativity.

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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

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Follow Dave Clark

Borrowing Time, Dave’s viral sci-fi short

Forbes article that mentions Borrowing Time

Dan’s article on how AI is changing filmmaking

Nathan Labenz’s podcast, The Cognitive Revolution