Chad Nelson’s Post

Transcript

How I made Forever Land, a full video game ad I created in 1 weekend. Alright, let's dive in. Step one, building the world. Now my kids loved "Little Big Planet", so I wanted to honor it with Forever Land. For this I built a custom GPT. It took about 30 minutes to get the look right with the macro photography, visible stitching, soft shadows and so forth. But once I had it, all I had to do was type in the object, setting or character that I was thinking of and it would create the visuals, such as this red mailbox, gold coins or even a cute hedgehog... all in the same style. For the game protagonist, I imagined an adventurous raccoon with a backpack and little goggles, and after a few attempts I landed on this guy. I also created the boss character, this octopus elephant with button eyes. Next I needed to create some environments and I based these on classic video game tropes such as an underground cave, a mining level, jungle, a city and so forth. So now I had my world. Step 2 Animation. One of Sara's many creation modes is Image to video. But what I love most about this is experimenting where I place this image in the timeline. I began by taking this hero image of my raccoon and placing it at the START, and I got some interesting results which you can see here. But check out this generation I got when I placed the image at the END of the timeline. Notice it starts off with some bizarre inconsistent visuals, but then look what happens in the final 2 seconds. I mean, this part is quite good. Like really good. I mean this is the gold I was looking for. So then I used RE-CUT to trim the clip to the last two seconds and placed that at the end of a new 5-second clip. Then prompted to have the camera do a 180�� rotation around the raccoon and within a few attempts... I got this shot. So Sora now knows what the raccoon looks like from many angles and with this I could generate all sorts of scenarios from the single shot with consistency. The key was always using this rotational shot to start my new generations. Then I could prompt it to run around and collect things like coins, or jumping, or entering a cave and it knew what the raccoon looked like. This is how I achieved the consistency. Now in one of the generations, I asked the raccoon to turn around with a playful spin and I got this cool move, which showed his personality as he runs down the road. This gave me an idea and I started to see a sequence in my head that I really liked. So first I used this rotational opening shot, then the spin move, and then to end I added this cave sequence. Then I added these three shots to a new timeline so that Sora could generate the in-between moments, tying it all together, or, as we call this in the world of animation -- the tweens. Now I had a seamless single-shot almost 35-seconds long with a completely consistent character. Which takes us to Step 3, bringing it all together. After I had all my clips, including the other characters, the environments, and the title animation, I brought it all into Final Cut Pro for a quick edit. And for the music and sound effects, I sourced those via Epidemic Sound. All in all, I spent about two days building the GPT, the visuals, and then animating it via Sora, and then about 1/2 a day doing the final edit with the audio. I mean this is not bad considering I started from nothing on a Friday night and then finished by Monday morning. Alright, so one final thought. When working with Sora, just remember it's going to create plenty of AI nonsense. I mean, these are AI systems after all. But it will also create some absolute magic. And once you find that gold, use the RE-CUT command to build from there. Because after a few generations, you're going to have enough clips and moments to string together an entirely new scene with consistency and far more control. And ultimately, that is how I built Forever Land. Now. If you want more info or have any additional questions, please feel free to throw them in the comments. I would love to answer and give you anymore details that you need.