Creating Viral Videos With AI

So I'm sure you've seen all of these memes going around where people recreate famous movies in sort of like a Balenciaga theme. Like this Harry Potter themed Balenciaga commercial, a Mars Batman themed Balenciaga commercial, and more recently, this Matrix commercial directed by Wes Anderson has actually been going kind of viral. The other day I actually asked the question on Twitter, what's something cool that you've seen someone do with AI that you wish you knew how to do? And people were saying they wanted to see how to do this kind of video. Here's another one of Star wars in the style of Wes Anderson. Primo data here said Balenciaga and a handful of other people on this thread made the same comment that they wanted to know how these types of videos were done. So I thought I'd make a super quick tutorial on it. I'm not gonna go quite as in depth as some of these other videos because these ones made a whole bunch of images. But the process is pretty much the same for the whole video. You would just spend a lot more time on it than what I'm gonna show you in this video. Now to start, the images that they're using in those videos were all created using Midjourney. Midjourney is an AI art platform where you can type anything you can imagine and it will generate that art for you. They used to have a free plan. They claim that eventually they're going to have a free plan or a free trial again soon. But as of right now, Midjourney is pay to play. Their lowest plan is 10 bucks a month where you can generate about 200 images a month. Personally, I'm on the $30 a month plan which actually gets me unlimited generation. To use Midjourney, you're gonna have to have a Discord account. I've talked about how to set up Mid Journ previous videos, so I'm not going to dive too deep into it in this video. But essentially you're going to go to the Mid Journey Discord bot. You can create your images directly inside of the newbie rooms here, or you can do what I did and invite the Mid Journey bot to your own server. If you want to create your own Discord server, simply come over to the left sidebar. Click on the plus to add a server. Create my own. Create for me and my friends and then name your server. Once you've named your server, it will show up in your sidebar. Here's mine. AI art test. You can come over to the Mid Journey bot here Click on it, click Add to Server, and then add it to the server that you just created. And then you'll have your own server where you can kind of keep all of your image generations organized. For this example, I wanted to do Batman in the style of a Wes Anderson film. Not the most creative idea in the world because obviously I just saw a Batman in the style of Balenciaga, and I just saw the Matrix and Star wars in the style of Wes Anderson. But I figured for this demonstration I would just mash the two of those together and do Batman in the style of Wes Anderson. So I start with the prompt, Willem Dafoe dressed up as the Joker in a film directed by Wes Anderson. Aspect ratio 16. 9. Style raw. I prefer to use the Style raw with version 5.1 because I feel like I get closer to the image that I envision in my head versus if you don't put Style Raw, Midjourney gets a little bit more creative with the imagery. These are the four images that it generated of Willem Dafoe as the Joker. This top left one here just screams Wes Anderson to me. That one looks the closest to what I would imagine Wes Anderson would dress up the Joker like. So I'm going to go ahead and upscale number one, and that is going to be our image of the Joker. Then I did Gwyneth Paltrow dressed up as Catwoman in a film directed by Wes Anderson. The only reason I selected Gwyneth Paltrow is because she was in the Royal Tenenbaums. And so I was just trying to think of people that Wes Anderson has cast in the past. These images are pretty good. I'd say this top right one is probably the closest to what I would imagine from Wes Anderson, but I'm going to go ahead and generate some more. So I'll just click this refresh button here and submit this to create more images of this one. Now, one thing most people don't tell you when they're doing these Mid Journey tutorials is oftentimes you're going to regenerate these images over and over and over again until you finally come up with one that you like. So far, in this example that I'm showing you, I've gotten kind of lucky and a lot of the images worked great the first time. But I do kind of want to find a better one of Gwyneth Paltrow as Catwoman, because this image to me doesn't really even look like Gwyneth Paltrow. And then I went and generated Jason Schwartzman dressed Up as superhero Robin in a film directed by Wes Anderson. I wanted to put superhero Robin in there just to give it that extra context that I didn't want him dressed up as, like, the bird Robin. And I thought that this top left one absolutely nailed it. This looks like an image from a Wes Anderson screenshot right here. So I'm gonna go ahead and upscale this one of Jason Schwarzman as Robin. And then I did Gene Hackman as Alfred the butler in a film directed by Wes Anderson. Same criteria. Ash. Aspect ratio 16.9 style raw. All of these look pretty decent, but I'd say this top left one or maybe this top right one. Actually, I'm gonna go with this top right one. This one, to me looks the most like a Wes Anderson scene. So I'm gonna go ahead and upscale number two here, which is this one. Then I thought it'd be funny to see Bill Murray as the Riddler is Bill Murray's in a lot of Wes Anderson films. And just the idea of Bill Murray being the Riddler seems funny to me. So I did Bill Murray dressed up as the Riddler in a film directed by Wes Anderson. And this is what it came up with. I really like this top right one because I really yellow glasses that it put on him. This looks like Wes Anderson's take on the Riddler to me. I mean, maybe there'd be some question marks on this suit, but that's kind of a tough ask for. AI. If you really want to get question marks all over the suit, you're probably going to need to pull it into, like, Photoshop or something like that and maybe add them yourself. So I'm going to go ahead and upscale number two on that one. And then I thought it'd be funny to put Owen Wilson dressed up as Batman. So I did Owen Wilson dressed up as Batman in a film directed by Wes Anderson. And it made all of them yellow for some reason, which might be a take that Wes Anderson would do. But I mean, I can't really imagine Batman wearing yellow. So I wanted to try again. So this time I did Owen Wilson dressed up as Batman wearing a black Batman outfit in a film directed by Wes Anderson. And now we've got more of that Batman black outfit look. I think this bottom left one is probably the closest to what I would imagine Wes Anderson would do. I love that he has the long hair and is still coming out the back of the mask. I think that's kind of hilarious. So I would upscale number three here. And then I wanted to do Owen Wilson dressed as Bruce Wayne. So I did Owen Wilson in a black suit as Bruce way in a film directed by Wes Anderson. And here's what it came up with. I'd say this bottom left one here is the most Wes Anderson y to me. So I'm gonna go ahead and upscale number three here. And then here is my redo of Gwyneth Paltrow as Catwoman. And I think this top right one is just perfect. So I'm gonna go ahead and use that one. And now we've got our images. We've got Willem Dafoe as the Joker. I like that. It's just sort of subtle face paint. I feel like if Wes Anderson was doing this, he would probably go real subtle on that. We've got Jason' as Robin, Gene Hackman as Alfred the butler, Bill Murray as the Riddler, Owen Wilson as Batman, Owen Wilson as Bruce Wayne, and Gwyneth Paltrow as Catwoman. So I'm gonna go ahead and download all of these images and save them to a folder on my desktop here. Now, I want to give a couple of them a voice. I don't want to. I'm not gonna go through voicing all of them, but I think it would be funny to get Owen Wilson's voice in there and maybe Willem Dafoe's voice saying, why so serious? Or something like that. The way I would get their voices into this is I'd use a tool like 11 labs where I can clone a voice. So in order to do that, I need to find an audio clip of each of those voices. So let's see if I can find a couple minute clip of Willem Dafoe speaking. I actually found some audiobook samples where Willem Dafoe narrated the audiobook. So I can use that as my audio clip to start here.

There's been an accident.

And then I found Owen Wilson on a podcast. So I'm gonna go ahead and use those to train the two voices inside of voice labs. So if I come over to seven labs here, I can click add voice, instant voice cloning, and let's go Willem Dafoe. And then I'll drag my audio sample over that I grabbed and let's click add voice and then it's going to try to train on that voice. Now, it already says clone. So let's see how this sounds.

Hello, my name is Willem Dafoe and I am the Joker.

So I just want like a short, short audio clip of him saying, why so serious?

Why so serious?

I'm going to change the voice settings here. I'm going to bring the stability down a little bit, see if I can get a different cadence to the voice.

Why so ser Serious? Why so serious? Why so serious?

It's a little bit better. So then what I'm going to do is I'm going to come up to my history and I'm going to grab this last one that I did because that was the best sounding one.

Why so serious?

So I'll go ahead and download selected and now I've got Willem Dafoe saying why so serious? I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing with Owen Wilson and let's go ahead and use this voice here and see how this one sounds.

My name is Owen Wilson and I'm so excited to be playing the role of Batman Wild Man.

It's so crazy every time I hear this and if I generate it again, it'll actually sound a little bit different.

My name is Owen Wilson and I'm so excited to be playing the role of Batman.

So I just need him to say, I am the Batman.

I am the Batman.

So now the next thing we want to do is we want to animate each of those images. If you remember a lot of the images have like a slight head nod or if they do say anything, you can see their lips move. And to do that we're going to use this tool called D id. So we'll start by creating a video. We're going to add a presenter for each character. So I'll click add. I've got my Batman command folder with each of the images. So let's go ahead and start with Willem Dafoe as the Joker. I'll open that up. We've got this image here. Now if I come over to upload voice audio, I can upload this audio that I created earlier with 11 labs. So I'll just click upload your own voice. Grab the one I made of Willem Dafoe here, open this up. I'm going to give it a title here. I'm going to do Willem Dafoe as the Joker. And then let's go ahead and click generate video. It's only going to take one credit here. And I will click generate. And now we've got our little one second video here. So let's take a peek.

Why so seriously?

So now you got the animation of him saying that. So I'll go ahead and download this video clip. I'm going to do the same thing with my Owen Wilson Batman. So let's go ahead and click add a presenter. Grab him as the Batman. Here, let's give it the title. Owen Wilson as Batman. Upload a voice audio. Grab our little audio clip here. Generate video. Click, generate again. Now we've got this little one second clip.

I am the Batman.

We can go ahead and download this. Now we want every other image that we created to be animated, but we don't want them to actually speak. We want them to just kind of nod their head or look around a little bit. And the way you're going to do that is you're gonna upload a silent audio clip. So a simple way to create an audio clip that's silent, you could use a tool like Audacity, which is a free audio editor, and just mute your mic and record, you know, seven seconds of silence. All right, so I went and recorded a seven second clip of silence. So let's just go ahead and export our project as an MP3 and I'm just gonna save it as silence. All right, I'm gonna go ahead and close out of Audacity now. I don't need it anymore. I'm gonna create a new video. I'm gonna add a new character. This time I'm gonna add my Bill Murray character. Click on upload voice audio. And then I'm going to grab my silence audio here and open that. Going to name it Bill Murray. And then we'll just go ahead and click generate the video. And now we have a seven second video clip. But if we watch it, there's no audio. But watch, you see Bill Murray blink, you see him kind of look around a little bit and we have an animation of him just kind of looking around and moving. And so we can use that however we want. Pick a little 1 to 2 second clip for when we pull it all together and use that clip of him moving around. So I'm going to go ahead and repeat that process for every other image that we've got. Create a video, add a charact character. Pull in Gene Hackman here, title it Gene Hackman. Upload voice audio. Grab our silence clip here. Generate video. Now we've got Gene Hackman looking at the camera and blinking and moving his head around a little bit. And now I have all the rest of my clips. I went ahead and did the rest. Here. I've got Gwyneth Paltrow here moving her head around. She actually winks, which I think is actually kind of cool. I wasn't anticipating the wink, but that's how it did it. We have Jason Schwarzman here kind of looking around with his funny glasses. And we have Owen Wilson as Bruce Wayne sort of looking around and blinking and being Owen Wilson. So now that that we have all of these clips, we want some music to go behind it that has a sort of Wes Anderson feel to it. So there's two ways to do that. You can try to generate something over on, you know, mubert.com, which is royalty free AI generated music. As long as you give attribution, you can use this music in your videos here. So I can actually enter a prompt and type something like Wes Anderson trailer music. All right. That sounds nothing like what a Wes Anderson trailer would sound like. We can choose genres and moods and activities. I feel like Wes Anderson would probably use something a little bit folky. So let's go ahead and do folk and see what it generates for us. All right. Wasn't really feeling that one. Let's go ahead and generate another folk song. So I tried a whole bunch here with Moobert. I couldn't get anything that sounded like what I was looking for. I do have a subscription to this site called Motion Array, which does have royalty free music. So I'm going to listen to a few songs on here and see if I can find something that sounds a little bit more like a Wes Anderson backing song. Okay, so on Motion Array I found this song and that to me sounds like Wes Anderson. So I'm going to go ahead and download that song and we're going to use that one. And now it's time to just pull them all together. So the way I would do that is personally I would come into DaVinci Resolve. It's a free video editing tool. I would pull all the media that I just created into it here I've got my Batman folder. So I'm just going to pull it all in, go ahead and let it change the frame rate. And then I'm just going to start dragging and dropping all of the video clips in. So I'll start with Gwyneth Paltrow here. Bring in Jason Schwartzman, Willem Dafoe. Then I need to shorten each of these clips because they're all a little too long here. I kind of like the wink that she gives and then her head gets a little funky with the ears, so I want to get rid of that. So I'll just kind of leave this initial wink in here. I'll make each little clip like only like one second long. Let me find the best scene from Jason Schwartzman. So I've pulled all the clips in and then I'm going to add my Music to the background. All right, so I've added the background music, but I want to make sure it sort of ducks down a little bit when they speak. So I'm going to go ahead and do that real quick. That's just a matter of breaking up the audio clips here and then clicking on this little button right here in the bottom corner. And then I can sort of bring the volume smoothly in and smoothly out here. Pull the volume down in the middle here to about. About negative. Let's go negative 6.9 there. And now it should duck nicely.

Why so serious?

All right, so the only other thing to do would be to add some text over the top. So inside of DaVinci, I'm going to use this text plus here, and I'm just going to put it over the top. Go to my settings here. Go ahead and position this a little bit lower so it goes across the bottom here. Let's pick a font that looks good. I'm going to use this Acme Gothic compressed here. Stretch this all the way to the end. Let's see if we can add a decent drop shad to it. I'm going to go ahead and do that. Leave it subtle. And I'm going to break it up at each one of these scenes so that it changes the word each time. So I'm just making a little cut at each scene. And then I'm just going to add my text in here. Gwyneth Ultro as Catwoman, Jason Schwartzman as Robin. And then one little touch that we can add if we want is we can do a little subtle zoom on each character. So the way I would do that in DaVinci is I would jump to the start of this frame here. I would come up to the top, right, click on this button to add a keyframe, come to the end of the frame here, and then set my zoom to like a 1.1. And let's see what that looks like. And you can see it does kind of a subtle zoom in. I might even want to make it even more subtle. Let's go 1.05. And then I can go through and do that for each of our other scenes. Here, set a key frame, go to the last frame. Here, set another keyframe, make our zoom 1.05. And now we get this kind of look.

Why?

And now if we watch the whole thing back, this is what we get.

Why so serious?

I am the Batman.

Now. This whole thing is only 10 seconds long. A lot of the memes that are going around on Twitter are quite a bit longer. They're 30 seconds to a minute long. But if I was to do that, this video would be a heck of a lot longer. So I wanted to show you a real basic, stripped down version of how it was done. They would just do a lot more images on mid journey, probably train a hand, handful more voices into 11 labs, do a lot more animations in DID, and then bring it all together. So I wanted to show you the super simplified version of how all of those other videos you've seen are accomplishing these memes. So now you know how to do it too. And if you love all of this nerdy AI stuff and learning how to make cool stuff like this, and learning about all the latest tools and tech to do really fun stuff, make sure you check out FutureTools IO. This is the website where I curate all of the coolest AI tools that I come across. I'm adding new tools every single day. I keep the AI news site up to date every single day. And if it's all too overwhelming and you just want a TLDR of what's going on for the week in AI, join the free newsletter. And every Friday I'll send you just the five coolest tools that I came across, a handful of the most important news articles for the week, a few YouTube videos that I came across or that I made, and one cool way to make money with AI again, it goes out every Friday. You can find it by going to futuretools IO. And if you want to stay in the loop with all the latest AI news, all the latest AI research, and get cool tutorials on how to do fun stuff with AI, make sure you like this video and subscribe to this channel and I'll make sure more of this kind of stuff shows up in your YouTube feed. I really, really appreciate you. Thanks so much for tuning in. See you guys in the next one. Bye Bye.

Sam.