if you're an indie filmmaker you're probably working with low to no budget but striving for Hollywood results And now with the rise of AI video tools the question becomes what's actually possible in this video I'm going to show you how I used AI generated video alongside real footage that I shot myself to create a cinematic trailer from start to finish By the way I'm John I'm a cinematographer and director And on this channel I make short films film making breakdowns and cinematography and lighting tutorials Let's get into it Lads like you run for too long This land will swallow you whole But you're with us now Soon you'll see what this world is really like This isn't about peace It's about control These men kill because they have to Then there's the judge War is God So the AI tool that I'm using for this video is LTX Studio They are sponsoring this video but whether you use this tool or not the principles and techniques I'm going to show and explain apply all the same Also just to note if you want to skip ahead to any part of this video I have timestamped everything below And also all the equipment and gear I've used in this video will be listed in the description as well So LTX Studio let you take your idea from script to storyboard to AI generated video all in one place My idea was simple Make a trailer for a film that doesn't exist And to make it more interesting what if it was a film that had never been adapted for the silver screen and that's when I discovered the novel Blood Meridian written by Cormarmac McCarthy the same man who gave us No Country for Old Men So now we've got the idea Let's jump into LTS Studio First we're going to create the storyboard for the trailer So we click on new storyboard Here you can import your full script or a general overview of your full story This was the prompt I put in Then below this I added in that it was a film trailer added in some genre keywords and the tone of the piece Once you're happy click next This takes you to the story line part which you can edit and give the overall description of your story And once that's done we come to this really fun part where you actually create all the characters for your story So if we click on one of the characters and choose edit I can then make any amends to refine how I see the character changing their age appearance clothing etc But once we're happy we click apply You can always go back to this part and add more characters if necessary And the final part here is the breakdown section Here we can describe the location what actually takes place in the scene and the characters that are involved Once we've got all this done we can then move on to create the story boards And to do that we just click the start [Music] button So let's jump in to the storyboard section These are my final story boards that I put together for the film trailer If I zoom out you can see that each row represents each scene And you can add as many shots as you want simply by clicking the plus button So one of the things that I'm really a big fan of when it comes to LTX Studio is they're clearly trying to give you a lot of control over what you're trying to create So if we take a look at one of these shots you can see the image generated here This image is generated from a few different things Again we can reference our characters here by typing the at and then the name and then describing the scene and the shot as we want it We then have the shot type where we're able to choose things like close-up medium shot wide shot etc There's also this create composition button This will open up a new page where you can actually draw the shot you're looking for to give the AI a better idea of the shot you're looking to create You can also upload a reference image as well So once you've got all your prompts sorted you can actually regenerate the image if you're not totally happy with it just by clicking the refresh button where you can also add character dialogue and add auto sound effects There's also the tool tab which if you click here allows you to upscale the image You can generate fill which basically is like Photoshop where you can paint in and ask it to generate something in that place that you've selected And there's also the object remove tool where you can do the opposite of that Select something and remove it from the image And you can also change the facial expressions and the camera angle as well And a quick final thing to show you just before we move on to the motion side of things is the side tab here where you can actually edit the location of the scene adding things like time of day weather and a description There's also style where you can change the aesthetic of the actual storyboard So changing it from a cinematic shot like this to more like a drawing or a cartoon Clothing which amends the character's clothing and sound where you can add a voice over and scene sounds as well Now to take these storyboards a step further we can also add motion to all of these images You simply click generate motion which allows the AI to autogenerate the motion of the scene Alternatively you can click the motion editor which will take you to a new page where you have a lot more control over the motion you're trying to get On the left here is the storyboard image I created and on the right are the final shots from the trailer So now we're going to walk through the trailer and I'm going to show you what shots were real and what shots were AI generated and I'm going to show you some techniques that you can apply yourself So the first three shots are all real footage Myself and my good friend Jamie went out to shoot at this location at 5:00 a.m So there is actually a reason I started this trailer with real footage It's a technique called perceptual fluency In simple terms when something feels familiar to us our brains are much more likely to accept it as being real So by starting with real footage where the lighting movement and texture feel grounded we set the expectation Then when the AI shot appears your brain doesn't question it because it expects the same consistency Shot four This is fully AI generated Personally this is where I think filmmakers can especially use AI to generate these wide establishing shots This was fully generated in LTX starting with a text prompt to image Then I used a second motion prompt to add movement and introduce a foreground element Shot five is also fully AI generated Shot six is another AI shot Shot seven and eight these are a hybrid of AI and real footage In my last video I showed you how to generate an AI background first and then film an actor to comp in with the same lighting But I did have a few people ask could you do it the other way around and the answer is yes And this is how I did it So first I used the storyboard image as my reference I filmed my mate Jake who's a great actor and has been in previous films of mine such as the Yogus which you can check out here So after filming the shots with Jake on a green screen I take these shots into Premiere Pro and export a still frame Then I imported that still image into LTX Studio and prompted it to generate a background with matching perspective Once I had the result I liked I upscaled the image opened this into Photoshop and removed the actor leaving a clean background plate Then I brought that plate back into LTX Studio to generate motion And the final step was compositing it all together in Premiere Pro Shots 9 and 10 were another hybrid workflow These two shots I actually got on the real location again with my mate Jamie We started with the close-up of the character I lit a 4x4 sheet of muslin with four lights to simulate fire from a car Then I flipped the camera to get a reverse angle from behind the character which I later composited into an AI generated burning car shot The next five shots are all AI generated The ocean cliff shot was meant to contrast the fire elements visually And the final three shots well the first is AI generated created directly from the storyboard image The last two shots were filmed with my friend Tim another acting legend and we shot those on location down in Southampton in the New Forest See the goal here with using real footage with real actors is to try and blur the lines by making the AI shots feel a little bit more plausible And as these tools evolve it's going to be that fine-tune control over character consistency location and environment that's going to really unlock AI's full potential in film making And finally as an experiment I've uploaded the trailer as a standalone video So if you're interested go check out the comments and see how many people could tell if it was AI or not [Music]