https://www.listennotes.com/e/47b5b909b1ee4d288ca8e4c4705d7568

Today we're going to be talking about how to turn your story into a movie and could be a TV show, animation, film, essentially. How do you take your ideas in your head and bring it into video? And I have none other than Nick Young, who is a Harvard trained filmmaker, worked in Hollywood and recently quiz job to go all in on AI videos. Because this space has evolved so much and we're now at a point where as a storyteller, you can turn your stories into books, you can turn your stories into audiobooks, some of us even turn our stories into comics. But now there's this whole new frontier where you don't need Hollywood or the approval of an executive producer or director, but you yourself can turn your story into a movie. So that's what we talk about today. All about making your own movies. But first, before we dive into the interview, I want to mention up the top. This is a beefy interview. There's going to be a lot that we cover and a lot of this is going to be brand new to, I'd say majority of you listening. And the good news is, if you want to dive deeper with us and learn more about making your own movies, me and Nick work together to write a book. Yes, we work together because for those who don't know me and Nick, we're starting a platform called Creator Word. It's the home for creators and storytellers to run a movie business where fans can pay you directly by episode, by show and you can actually turn this, this new format that you now can create in into a business where you can make money. So that's really cool. So we run on that platform, working with another one of our friends from Harvard. It's a ton of fun. It's in beta now, so I'll link to it in the description. You're welcome to join. If you have any questions, let me know. Because we are in beta. It is early days, but it is now. Just because you can make money with movies doesn't mean it's like, how do I, how do I make the movie? So we're going to talk about that in the podcast, obviously, but the book called Creator would. It's all about how to build a movie business with AI. It's all about how to grow your audience through film, how to make films, how to turn your stories into films efficiently and quickly, but also make really great films. So the book is awesome. And I know when I say book, a lot of you go, oh my God, I have to read another book. It's going to go on my tbr, I'm never going to get to it. And it is a full book. It is comprehensive, it has so much in it. But it's also just about 10,000 words. So it'll take you like an hour to read it and you'll digest it and you can basically read it in the time that it'll take to listen to this podcast. Now, this podcast, we're going to dive deeper into some things. Specifically, we're really going to dive deep into how people who have books already or who have stories already can use AI to adapt them to film. There'll be some of you who now kind of create stories natively through this process. They take story, oh, I'll go story straight to film. But there'll be others of you who already have books written that want to go to film. So that's we're going to focus on today. As I've mentioned before, beyond the Book is all about helping you turn your stories into an empire. If you haven't subscribed yet, would love for you to subscribe. If you haven't yet followed my newsletter, you should. You'll get a free like 50 cards. I have the card deck here. You'll get all these for free. 50 free superpowers and how to grow your author business. So you should sign up for the newsletter. The newsletter's focus is broadly on how to market your stories on where this world is going in publishing, not just with AI video, but with turning your books into different merch, building community, all the different things. It's so much fun. People occasionally talk about AI video in this podcast because it's so, so exciting. But if you want to like be inside of AI video world where we talk about it all the time, then you should join. Make your own movies. It's at makeyourownmovies tv. It's a free weekly newsletter where me and Nick share insights. Nick sharing all his filmmaking insights, me sharing all my weird business insights on how you can make incredible films and grow a business doing it. Now, in addition to the newsletter, we have a podcast for make your own movies, which when this is live, that first episode will be live. So you can go and listen to that right away. We're going to be featuring some incredible people who are building these AI tools, who are creating these AI films, from storytellers to technologists to everyone in between. And in addition to that, we also have a group. It's a Facebook group specifically, actually more for authors. It's all about AI video for authors. We'd love for you to join. It's a great spot. So all of that's just linked down below. Lots of very, very exciting things. We even have a cohort course coming in like August where if you want to like work with me and Nick live and go through like actually making moves from awesome people, we're coming out that too. But for now, you have this incredible podcast that we've just came out with newsletter and book. So all that's there now. Enough of me blabbering on about all the awesome free stings we're giving away. And the platform's free to join too, by the way. All of it's just out there ready for you. But what I want to talk to you, Nick, today is really granularly how we can take our stories as authors into films. Because I see people doing this and it's pretty wild. But it's one of those things when you start throwing out these AI tools and people have heard me already on the podcast talk about cling, talk about mid journey, like all that's cool, but what's the workflow? How do we dive into it? So before we get into like that really nitty gritty, first, I want to hear about you, Nick. First of all, welcome to the pod and thank you for having me. What's like, how did you get into filmmaking?

Yeah, so this started probably when I was around 10 years old and I was always making like little YouTube videos, honestly, purely for fun, purely as a thing to do to hang out with my friends. And it was just an outlet for my own creativity in how I expressed my stories. And it was pretty easy. I kind of just learned through doing with the tiny little handheld camera back in the day and just editing in like Windows Movie Maker and so just using the bare minimum basic techniques through that I always knew, which I'm very grateful for in high, in retrospect, that I love filmmaking. And I knew it was very clear that that was my single passion. And so I studied film at Harvard and I graduated in 2023, and I specifically studied art, film and visual studies within Harvard, and I specialized in like film production. And so from there I worked on set for one of my internships in Oklahoma, actually on a Martin Scorsese movie. And I also did a lot of Hollywood internships, the classic script coverage and giving feedback that way. And finally I moved to LA right after graduating, where I was there for a year and a half working at Entertainment360, representing a list actors and directors and writers. So now we fast forward to the current day in which AI video technology has advanced so much in a very exciting way that you and I now get to work together and create something pretty amazing.

I was like, what? So exciting. Yeah, okay, I get your ark and film. Why don't you share like at a personal level? Because we're going to talk about where the tech's at now, but it's not like this has been a thing for a long time. And also like you mentioned, you study film in college, so it's not like you're like a tech bro. So how did you come into learning about where this AI film tech's going and what were your thoughts in it? Like, as someone who loves film, me personally, like, when I first saw AI writing, like, I'll be honest with you, like, I wrote 12 books in high school. I went and dedicated so much of my life to writing and I was like, it wasn't like initial unbelievable excitement. There was part of me that was like, this is something deeply personally that I love that I didn't think AI would be able to do and now I can do. So I'm curious, like for you, what was your first interaction with it like? And how did you even come to find out?

Yeah, no, great question. Very important question. And I remember very vividly one person in my colleague's assistant group chat sent in when SORA was first debuted a link to like our assistant imessage group chat to the SORA announcement, which is of course OpenAI's video model. And that was kind of a first preview at any major company. The ability to generate completely artificially intelligent video. That blew my mind. I mean, I remember that night I could not sleep because I was just so fascinated by the creation process. But also I wanted to find out when it was available to the public because it wasn't until multiple months after they previewed it that it was actually accessible. And so I was honestly just really kicked off from then, like really just tapped into newsletters and all sorts of creative endeavors. Just try to like wrap my mind around how this was possible. And so now, of course, that was over a year ago and a lot has happened since then. And so I think going back to your other question about how does that make me feel as a filmmaker coming from in person production, it is really difficult to transition, obviously. But I think for me, when I generate a video using my words in the prompt, which is entirely my creation, that subsequent video feels like my own creative property. Feels like that is something that I created that I own. And in the same exact way that I felt When I made YouTube videos in a way where I loved sharing it with people, I loved posting it, and I loved getting other people's opinions. And it's just obviously so much faster now with AI filmmaking and obviously the term itself, being an AI filmmaker, no one really knows what that truly means yet, but I think what you and I would both agree on is that they soon will, and it will be pretty magnificent. And so I just love playing around with it still to this day. I mean, even generating images, it just fills something creatively within me that I'm lucky I was able to just kind of pivot into this direction where I still love traditional filmmaking, but this is just so much more exciting.

Yeah, no, I get it. It's. It gives you, like, freedom to tell the story you want in a way that, like, wasn't possible just a little while ago. And you mentioned, like, some of these tools. Why don't we talk about the landscape for a little bit in. In the world of writing, which I'll also link to this down below. I came out recently with a belt of the kind of core tools that you need as your superhero belt, as a storyteller that you would need as indie author, right? You got your formatting tools for book formatting. You've got your different analytical tools to be able to know, like, what book should be published, your writing tools, or you actually draft. It's kind of like a whole little tech stack that we have as authors to help us go from story in our head to book. What is the sort of types of tools one would use? You can even mention some names, of course, as well. That'd be helpful that we can even approach, like, before we even talk about how to use them. Like, what actually are we using?

Great question. And I think that's also a point where some people get overwhelmed. Just the diving in spot, like, what is this? And I think it really boils down to two separate types of tools, one of which is AI image generation, and the other AI video generation. Because to make a great video, what's pretty commonplace nowadays for AI filmmakers, is to start with an image that you make with AI to then use as a base for your AI video. And so the best AI image generator is midjourney at the moment, which has really progressed quite a bit. And from there you can then use a handful of AI video tools, which include Sora, cling and VO3.

Okay, so you've got the image generation. Get the video generation. When I actually make the video, I'm just trying to think like, how does the audio work? Is the audio and video being made together like I asked? You mentioned a tool like Cling. Do I ask it? Hey, Cling, go make me this audio and video, or am I going to other tools for audio?

CLING and VO3, for example, both actually have their own audio capabilities where you can lip sync, you can create your own voices for the characters within that tool. But at the moment, I wouldn't say that's the highest quality. In that case, you would go to external audio AI generation sites such as 11 Labs, which is great for voices, or Suno, which is great for sound effects, but mostly music creation. Original scores for your film. Really anything you want. You can then take the pieces of everything and then assemble it as a regular editor does for your final product. But yeah, it's a great question because there is a lot of processes, none of which you have to do all of, but you can. And so I think it's just having an idea in your head first that you then can build off of and using the appropriate tools, most of which you will have your own taste in. Like, some people prefer SORA over cling and vice versa. And I think it's kind of up to the creator themselves to decide that.

Okay. Yeah, so I'm kind of getting the vibe. Taste test the different tools. There's a lot of different ones out there. Okay. All right, that's. I'm diving in with you. I'm feeling it. So there's a lot of these tools. A little overwhelmed, but let's now talk about how you would begin. So I have a story. I'm here. What do I do next? I come to you with a pitch. I want to create. I want to create Sharknado, but with unicorns. Okay, interesting. That's great. Go do it. What do I do next?

It's great that you have your Sharknado vision first of all, and that is your focal point. So what most regular, traditional filmmakers do is storyboard their idea before they have any kind of video or image. And so that first involves you in Mid Journey with images, where you get the whole vibe of your film, which includes mood, color palette, and of course, your characters, your protagonist, antagonists. You can generate all of those with Mid Journey, where you can then lock in your characters and they fit into your world. You can also create the setting itself. Is it a Mayan city? Is it in the past, the future, a different planet? What time of day is it? All of that is exactly how you can create your own world. And that is also exactly how you create videos themselves as base images. You can then take all of that and convert it into video.

So a lot of this comes down to understanding what I want the scenes to look like and getting the images in. But then I started to think like again, for folks who are like wondering my sort of skeptical questioning. I'm trying to like take this sort of mindset of being someone who's like a little bit more on the outside of AI video where I'm a little bit more on the inside now, so that this could be more useful conversation and not just me, Nick, like having like, you know, sort of geek talk back and forth. So with that I know one of my worries used to be, and still kind of is everyone says you can tell what an AI image is. There's like that sort of AI style and it's like, okay, well I have obviously my unique story, my unique dialogue, my unique characters. But if the film itself, the video itself is all going to be kind of based off of these images that all use the same AI style. Like I don't know how much I like that. You know, I want to create a story that feels like it's mine. So how do I work around that? Is there a way around that?

So what I'd actually recommend is using reference images that you have in mind from your favorite filmmakers or your favorite digital artists or even a painter. AI is very good at blending modes of creativity in a way where you're not taking exactly your favorite cinematographers style and making it your own, but just a touch. You can actually have a sliding scale of how much you want to use of that style. And you can obviously blend multiple styles at once. You can do anime style comic books, you can do animation, which maybe you hadn't considered before, but because of AI, you can most certainly stick to a style, make it your own and have your same great story part of it.

Okay, yeah, no, no, that makes total sense. And Midjourney also has a feature too where like you can actually like completely train it on your own custom style, right? It's like you have to pay for it, right? But you can do that too.

That is part of their new version seven. It's called personalization. Really cool feature. Basically you take this 200 image survey which MidJourney gives you. For each one, two separate images. Sometimes they're pretty unrelated, but all you have to do is click your favorite out of the two for 200 times. But you only have to do this once and from that Midjourney understands your own Artistic taste in what themes you like, color palettes, what kind of moods. And from there, if you click opt in to Personalization, every time you make an image, it syncs that. It knows your taste. And you can do this also separately in your own mood board. Projects within Mid Journey, where you have reference images of all your favorite movies and shows and what you want your world to be, and that is exactly how you personalize it.

Okay, that's so cool. That's wild. Yeah, it doesn't even take that long, relatively, so that's really, really interesting. Okay, so I've got my images. I'm then going to bring those images. I might use reference images to make those images. Now, how do things like character consistency and set consistency work? Because when we're talking about, like, making films, that's obviously something we want to do. We want to make sure our characters are consistent. We want to make sure our settings are consistent totally.

Midjourney has three options for this. Each time you generate an image, you can of course, just prompt it with no references, but you can also upload an image reference, which is any kind of standard image. You can use that as a base and then modify it. Like, for example, we could upload a picture of us in real life, taken on our phones and say, make this a cartoon, or make us in armor riding a dragon, something like that. It just takes the image for what it is and spins off that for characters, which is much more important for what we want to make. This is the same. But you can upload any kind of image, maybe that you've already made or maybe someone, your family member, whatever, then you can create that. But instead of the overall image, it ignores the background of. It ignores the setting. Really focuses on the character themselves, which includes their outfit, their facial expressions. But that is something that you should really pay attention to, character consistency, because it's so important to storytelling. Of course. But that's the second of the Mid Journey images. And then the last one is the style itself, which is not taking the character or the image, but really focusing on the color or the shadows. Just what kind of image is this? That's something that's also really cool. Kind of related to the personalization feature, but that's more. So you have a character, you have an image you like, but you want it to make it more stylized. Your style, your own vision. And that's the third option in Mid Journey, all of which are obviously extremely useful.

Wow. Okay, that's wild. And like, what has been your experience with it? Like, is it because you know how like humans were just so good at recognizing like even small differences in faces. Like is it, is it at the point where it's like, oh, that's cool or like, oh wow. Like no, this will work for a film.

It works 100%. If you play it right. If you know your sliders, which is how closely that you choose each reference to follow your prompt, then absolutely it can work. It matches your characters, your style, and then you can obviously compare them yourself as you generate each scene, each starting and ending frame of a scene. It's magic, honestly. It's kind of like the one thing Sora was missing when it was debuted. But now that they've had over a year to kind of iterate on this, all AI companies for video at least I think are really focusing in on that because it's so important for an individual AI filmmaker to stay consistent. And it's pretty magical that it's now entirely part of the whole process.

Okay, okay, so now I'm thinking, okay, great, but what on average are like the length of clips that these things produce? Like if I make a prompt, am I going to be like, can I take an image and then like put in my book chapter? And now I've got like the book chapter spit back out as a movie or how granular do we have to get with this?

I think a full chapter would not work in any AI video or image generation, unfortunately. Although it would be convenient. That's why being a great prompter is so important, where instead of a whole chapter, you can divide this into different sections of your chapter. But a great prompt really only consists of one to two sentences because usually you're only creating a five second video clip at a time. And because of this you want to make sure the visual elements, which is obviously the most important factor when prompting. And in that case you really want to make sure you have the framing, what is happening, the action, character and setting. And that's kind of about it. Like you really don't want to overly complicate the prompts because that's where you get four generations, where you're over ambitious in what you want to generate. Because I think what's really important is taking it bite sized pieces, just small bits at a time can really make a prompt great because at its current moment, using one tool like a Sora, you really don't want to overwhelm it.

Yeah, okay, so you said five seconds. That's short, that's short. Can it do longer than that? Or that's really what you recommend it.

Can, but it usually tends to decrease in quality the more you try to extend it within the tools themselves. So that is one of the constraints at the moment, which I'm sure AI video will progress to minutes of footage pretty soon. But yes, five seconds can be a little frustrating, I think, as a filmmaker, just because it's not the full scene. You know, that's like the one difference, one of many differences, but between AI filmmaking and a real life production, traditional onset, you know, you would shoot couple minutes of scene, whereas here you kind of do it.

Yeah, I'm thinking of adolescence. Like, they were able to fill that all in one shot. Right. You know, it's crazy, right? Okay, I'm with you. So let's take a step back because I want to dive even a little bit more into these tools and how it all goes. But I think we need to, like, pull ahead of the sand and be like, okay, what can we use this for? Because obviously we talked about what we're doing with Craterwood, and the platform didn't share the full picture yet, though, which I will share this briefly right now. What we're working on now, in addition to helping you make money from movies and get your movies discovered, is building the tool that actually lets you combine all these tools, all these AI tools into one platform where you can just, in one streamline view, create the movies you want to make and not have to go to cling, not have to go to Sora, not have to go to midjourney, but be able to pull and use all these tools in one place, one streamlined home. So if all this is sounding like a lot in the very near future, we are solving that and putting an all in one tool specifically designed to help you make films. And then when you're done with the film, you upload it to our platform and you can make money. It's awesome. So obviously like, the business model of it more. Honestly, there's just so much to dive into. We're going to save for another podcast. Like, essentially, just like you can sell audiobooks, like I mentioned, just like you could sell ebooks, you can now sell films. And it's epic. And the book dives into even a little bit of how you can build a business around it as well, which is really, really exciting because I personally believe this business is going to be bigger than the ebook business, bigger than the audiobook business now by a lot. Now, the thing is, we can also, as the way you're describing it, I think we can use this technology as authors, as storytellers for things that aren't explicitly making films. Like we can make a film designed for the consumption of the film in and of itself. But it sounds like we can also use this for our marketing. Like these things gotta be crazy good with like TikToks Instagram Reels. I've been seeing a lot of like AI Bible creators, which as a little shout out. If you want to see me talk about AI Bible creators, you should subscribe to MakeYourOwnMovies TV. Because my first article I'm writing there, me and Nick kind of trade off writing articles. The first one I'm writing is all about how there's literally like influencers from the Bible who are vlogging now. It's like obviously AI, but it's very interesting, it's gone very viral. But you can basically create vlogs of your characters now. Like that feels pretty realistic. Like, oh, how does it do with like fantasy settings? Like can I feed it things that are like somewhat unrealistic and it'll still create it?

Yes, I would say it might even be better at that than hyper realistic quality. And that's where the fun comes in. I mean with our platform, our creators, they will bring in potentially new genres of film or like you said of just marketing. I mean what an author could do is animate five seconds long their book cover. Maybe that they made with Mid Journey or maybe they already have it, but just using that and giving a little life and that, yeah, is really awesome.

Ooh, like an animated book cover. That's really interesting, Nick. I like that. Yeah, like you can just have it. Book trailers, obviously. I've mentioned this before, I think in the pod, but 50% of AD inventory on Meta is video, so most authors are not making videos, nevermind good videos. So you can really increase the number of eyeballs your ads can reach by implementing these short videos. And these are easy to create now, which is why like it can hurt to try using a lot of these things. They're cheap, very cost effective for the most part. And you'll just play around with it and see how fun it can be. So yeah, you can use it for your marketing. You can use it to immerse your readers in different ways. And of course you can use it to make films, which. Let's talk a little bit more about all this. So you're saying to me I've got these short little sections. What I'm now trying to think about is when I'm writing a book, right, I'm thinking about the plot beats, which A lot of is inspired by film and screenwriting. I'm thinking about the different sort of scenes and passion of the novel, but I'm thinking about it from the narrator's point of view and I'm going, okay, here's chapter one. Here's how the plot moves, here's how we move through everything. How do I think about planning a story for films that I actually have these prompts? Because my instinct is I'd want to prompt in sequence, generate this five second clip, then the next five seconds, the next five seconds. So I'm kind of getting this film in order. But then that means understanding what each five seconds is. And that honestly feels like a pretty hard bridge for me to gap. Like my mind is kind of like, how do I do that?

Yes, you can do that with ChatGPT. You can take your book chapter, copy and paste it, or even upload a PDF of just that chapter and say, reduce this to the key visual elements and key points of the story. And then after that you can then ask the things that it reduced it to, then create those into prompts for the images for the videos. Surprisingly, maybe unsurprisingly at this point. ChatGPT is great at tool specific prompts as well. Like if you say a mid journey prompt, it can do that. If you specify a cling 5, 10 second video prompt, it can do that. And so it's just these little steps really add up.

Okay, yeah, yeah. So yeah, I could put a prompt like that to chatgpt in my chapter and then it'll give me back like 20 or 30 prompts that I will then put into Clang if I'm understanding correctly.

Exactly. Yeah. So this is kind of your extra.

Okay, so this is starting to feel. Go ahead, you got, you got. It's gonna say. It's starting to feel like achievable now. Like I can see it.

Yeah, no, it's like this is your assistant sidekick. This is all hours available to you and you can experiment at your own pace. You can create a story that is yours with each tiny step. That will make a movie, a film, an ad. Anything that you want, you now have at your disposal with no team necessary. I mean, you can do this all from your computer at home and create exceptional content.

Wow. Yeah. Okay, so let's say I do this. I'm prompting now. I'm getting these video generations. In your experience, what has it been? Do I know? When I've tried to use image generation tools, I'm imagining a lot of folks listening have used the Image generation tools for you'll get something a oftentimes that's like 90% of what you want, but it's not quite exactly what you want. There's something a little off about it. First of all, how often does that happen in video? And then how do you go about getting around these things? Like how do you go about actually getting what you want when your original prompt didn't work?

Sure, I think it's pretty frequent, honestly, in which it doesn't quite match your vision. But you will get a lot better at this over time. You can certainly iterate on any video, any image. A lot of these tools have editors built in where you can tweak the prompt a little bit or frame it, crop it in a way where it automatically regenerates according to what you changed. But most of the time the issue is in the prompt itself. I think you really have to look back at almost from the perspective of the AI, what is it analyzing and then generating and what tiny step of that went wrong. And so I think once you really play around with it, you'll get a grasp for what prompts generate what content. So the, that is where the skill comes in. And you will get very skilled just by doing it, just by experimenting with your visions. And so I would really advise anyone trying to get into this just to play around with it, just to get a feel. Because once you get even 10, 15 minutes on it, you'll really understand how it works. And I think from there that will then in turn make you a better creator. It kind of forces you to really understand your story at a depth that you hadn't thought of before.

Totally. Yeah. No, I'm with you. I know that in terms of lengths, I'll just give this up front to people. First of all, if you're making like TikToks and book trailers, those videos can be like relatively short. Like it's not going to be like a hundred generations necessarily that you have to do to make a 30 second TikTok. Now when it comes to like an episode of television, I think we traditionally think they need to be longer. But after studying apps like Real Shorts and Drama Box, which the book goes into more detail about the average episode length there is around one to three minutes, which is wild. So you can actually create these bite sized, like almost scenes, right? Each episode being a scene, breaking it down into that. And then those can be episodes that can be released on social, but then also a place like Craterwood where you can actually charge per episode. As people go further throughout it what we do on Creatorwood is actually show you the completion rate of each episodes that you can see when people are like really hooked, when they're completing it all the way through everyone. And then you can start charging. So the barrier to entry is even lower than you might think from a content perspective. Obviously you're not going to be charging like $10 for every three minute episode. Let's, you know, be a little realistic. But you can charge a dollar here, $2 there and start to really build it up where people are like, oh God, okay, I'm hooked. Right? So that's one way to think about it. But the other thing that I'm kind of missing now in all this is I get all these clips. What do I do is cling, feeding it out to me and Sora like a master clip. It's almost like they build on each other and oh great, I get to have my movie now. Or what happens?

I wouldn't say within the tool itself you'll get your exact film without any kind of editing from your end. So this is where it actually kind of resorts back to traditional filmmaking in that you just have to use an editor, pretty simple cuts and matching audio. But a lot of the times with your already pre generated clips, even if they're five seconds, they will have everything you need from the camera angle, the shots, everything will actually be your vision. And so all you have to do is just splice them together, which is very basic editing. I mean you could even do it on imovie. You don't need a Adobe Premiere Pro subscription and they're already high quality. So it's just kind of up to you, multiple uses even with each clip. I mean you can have your TikTok, your trailer, your ad, whatever you want to make. You can, I mean you can do iterations off your own idea already. So it's really up to you. Once you have everything in terms of like overall content, it's just simple editing.

Okay. Okay. And would you have like your top recommended tools? Those are like Cap Cut for that or.

Yeah, Cap Cut's great. Adobe Premiere Pro is pretty good as well. Yeah, I wouldn't say you necessarily need a super high end editor either, depending on what you're trying to do. But of course there's everything out there and I'm sure there will be a lot more advanced AI editing as well, including our tool that we're creating as well. So I think the future is, I.

Think that'll be the ultimate solution because you'll just be able to do it.

All in one place, totally simple, easy. You don't have to go to all these different tools and remember it. It'll just be step by step within one tool.

Yeah, yeah. Now, what stories do you think are best to be made into film right now? Is there an answer to that or it's purely what someone is excited about? Do you think there's certain types of stories that the technology, like, is actually better suited for right now?

I think a lot of it has to do, especially if it's a story about a fantasy world, for example, because before AI Video, you had no capability of portraying that easily and with a low budget, a low team, low number of teammates. So I would say that any kind of sci fi world as well. But at the end of the day, anything that grasps your attention, if you're an author, you have your existing stories, but you always had this notion in the back of your head, what if I turn this into a movie that you should follow? Because with AI Film, anything is possible. And so it's entirely up to you, because I think what the consumers will see is your authenticity and your passion as a storyteller. Because once you have that, it's clear that your vision will all come together in whatever you create.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, follow the passion, for sure. I think a great thing, too, people can start doing now is like trying to run Kickstarters, seeing what their readers are interested in getting, like, funding for the film up front so that you can have some of your time like you already know. Okay, I'm gonna be able to dive into this because I'm getting paid for my readers to basically learn and dive into it. So there's a lot. There's a lot there because I think there's a lot of demand for films. So you can just go to your readers and be like, what do you want to see? What do you want out of my stories? Like, even vote on it. Do a little poll, see which story you know. Some. Some stories, like fans, like, want to see on TV more than others. This is where it gets, like, really exciting. Like, Hollywood's been trying to adapt books and has so much of Hollywood's IP comes from books, and now you can just take it and do it yourself. And I can guarantee you there's 10 times more amazing films that will also make a lot of money that could have been made that Hollywood never did. Maybe an option it just sat on a shelf, or maybe it just never got option to begin with. So it's a really exciting world. And instead Having a studio option it. Let your fans not option it, but your fans test it out. Which is why I always recommend starting too with a pilot. Like, you don't need to go build a full season or build out a full movie. Test it out with a few episodes first. Only from a tech perspective, but most importantly from a fan perspective to see if they like it. Because if that's something that, that you can continue doing, then you could continue investing time and energy into it. So with all of this, if I'm just getting started, I've listened to this podcast, but I've, I honestly don't, I don't know like where to begin. I literally just have listened to this. I'm kind of overwhelmed. What would be your action steps for someone who has a book, wants to turn it into a film? 3 to 5 like things they could do right now in order just to get started and to get some movement forward?

Absolutely. First step is truly thinking about your story visually from the perspective of a camera. Because with traditional movie adaptations of great books, that's always the number one step as well is could this be translated on screen? What do we want to see when your story in book format is now on a screen and that is visually captivating. So once you know that, then you begin the on screen adaptation, which is through mood boards and storyboards, which of course we talked about with Mid Journey. That's a key part. Then what we also Talked about using ChatGPT to transform your sections. You can even do this without GPT, but just a summary of key moments visually from your chapters and reducing those to perfect prompts which you can then prompt your images, even some videos initially. From there you have this great outline of your world. You know what it looks like, the settings, each scene, and then you can transform that into a video. With all the video tools we talked about, you really get your final scenes all cut together. Then of course that's using simple basic editing, any kind of tool. And from there that's also where the audio part comes in. Like we talked about. Suno elevenlabs, even just free non AI audio also works. But I think using these tools appropriately is how you then get the final polish. Polish is kind of another term just in filmmaking for bringing every element all together into the perfect story, which you can then choose to do whatever you want with.

I love it. Amazing. Go forth. Go forth everyone. It is time. You've done amazing, Nick. I feel like we could talk for hours, but that's exactly what the make your own movies podcast is for. So if people want to continue hearing the conversation between me and Nick will literally pick it up right where we left off here and chat about what's to come with make your own movies on the first ever podcast episode. So I love you. Listen. Subscribe to that podcast in addition to this one. Would be honored to have the place of two podcasts in your lineup and share this with friends. You know, we're at a very early stage here and I think the people who get in right now are pioneers of this new industry. I can't tell you exactly what's to come, but I can tell you there's with a hundred million percent certainty, something really big here. And our goal is to help you create it. So we're really excited, we're really grateful. Like I mentioned, we have a book, totally free. Download it. It's gonna be in the link in the description. We've got the newsletter and the podcast. Sign up for it so you get updated. You can listen to the ones that are already out. And we've got some amazing things coming. Craterwood's in public beta right now, so you can check it out, but odds are you'll need some help making the films. First, you'll probably want to check out the make youe Own movie stuff because you'll probably need some help. That's my guess, because Maker creator Wood's great when you're ready to upload your films and soon. It'll be great when you're ready to create your films because we'll build that in. That's when we're going to get more closer to our actual public launch. All the best. Thank you again, Nick. And as always, I hope everyone listening has graced their day and doesn't forget together we're a ballast.