Using ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Adobe Firefly to Create Movie Posters

The advent of Midjourney and text-to-video tools has ushered in a revolutionary era for creatives and filmmakers. Gone are the days of labor-intensive design sessions and brainstorming meetings. With Midjourney, you can now craft stunning movie posters in mere minutes. But the key to unlocking the full potential of this AI-image generator? A well-crafted prompt. And who better to assist in generating these prompts than ChatGPT?

Mastering the Art of Midjourney Prompting with ChatGPT

While Midjourney is a powerful tool, its output is only as good as the prompt it receives. A vague or poorly constructed prompt might yield unsatisfactory results. This is where ChatGPT comes into play. By turning ChatGPT into an expert prompt writer, you can ensure that your Midjourney creations are both accurate and captivating.

To achieve this, we'll program ChatGPT with the following prompt:

“You excel at crafting text-to-image prompts for movie posters that precisely depict scenes or artworks from given descriptions from the user. Factor in elements like artistic characteristics, ambiance, viewpoint, artistic style, illumination, color schemes, and layout when applicable. For optimal visualization, use succinct phrases, essential keywords, and brief clauses separated by commas. Keep the entire prompt under 60 words. Do you understand your role?”

With this instruction, ChatGPT becomes a master at crafting detailed and effective prompts tailored for Midjourney.

Crafting a Midjourney Movie Poster

To demonstrate the synergy between generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney, let's craft a movie poster for our fictional film, "The Last Cyberspace: A Journey Beyond the Digital Frontier,” which we also created a movie trailer script and AI-generated voice for in our other blog. This sci-fi epic envisions a future where the digital realm is on the brink of collapse, and humanity stands at the precipice of losing its most significant technological achievement.

To generate a prompt for Midjourney, we'll feed the film's theme into ChatGPT after programming it with the first prompt above:

"Describe a movie poster for a sci-fi film titled 'The Last Cyberspace: A Journey Beyond the Digital Frontier', set in a future where the digital world is disintegrating."

Once ChatGPT provides the detailed prompt, it can be directly fed into Midjourney to visualize the movie poster. The result? A seamless integration of AI-driven language and image generation, bringing the world of "The Last Cyberspace" to life.

When inputting a prompt into Midjourney, you need to start with the /imagine command. After that, just copy and paste the ChatGPT prompt into Midjourney. One important point to remember is to include the aspect ratio at the end of the prompt. For movie posters, this is usually 2:3. To do this in Midjourney, you want to add —ar 2:3 after the main prompt.

Here is our final prompt. Yours should look something similar.

"Title: ‘The Last Cyberspace: A Journey Beyond the Digital Frontier’, crumbling digital landscape, neon-lit ruins, silhouetted figure gazing into the void, cool blues and electric purples, sense of decay and awe, futuristic. —ar 2:3”

And here are some of the posters Midjourney outputted on the first try for our film.

After you choose one (or all!) of your favorite posters, all that’s left to do is put them into a photo editing software, such as Canva or Adobe, remove the lettering, and add your own title.

For our film, we simply used Adobe Firefly’s “Generative Fill” to remove the lettering and end up with a fresh movie poster. (We will be writing an Adobe Generative Fill guide in the near future, but it is very simple to use for this purpose.)

Here is the poster with the removed text.

The last step is to take this and simply add your title and font with an editing software, such as Canva, which is what we did here.

With this approach, you can harness the combined power of ChatGPT and Midjourney to revolutionize the way movie posters are conceptualized and created. Whether you're an indie filmmaker or part of a major studio, the future of film promotion is here, and it's powered by generative AI.