The latest episode of our Chronicles series features an ominous dark tower in the middle of a barren red desert, under the eerie glow of a perpetual eclipse.
This turned into a pretty interesting visual development / exploration project utilizing an assortment of generative AI and traditional tools, which yielded a collection of pretty atmospheric fly-by motion sequences resembling cinematic renders.
The process started with a bunch of rough thumbnail sketches that were painted over and modified.
These sketches then guided the generation of high-detail still images, which were further refined, painted over and manually modified to achieve the desired feel and composition.
These high-detail frames served as the basis for generating motion sequences with various camera controls.
The following tools were used in the process:
I compiled all this material into the sleek little 2-minute “music video” below.
The real kicker is that the video editing was the only reason this entire project didn’t fit into one(!) single 8-hour workday, which is mind-boggling.
While Gen AI-powered workflows still have kinks to work out in production settings, they are already extremely powerful and formidable tools for pre-production and ideation.
And as a bit of an extra, here’s a gallery of the fully finished and color-corrected high-detail generated stills, along with their original thumbnail sketches:
