What ChatGPT Imagines a Space Whale Would Think

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  The image of the space whale against a green screen color I used for the most difficult shot to create

Inspiration

I just always found the image of a "space whale" super cool and interesting. So one day I decided I would create an AI short based on this concept. Then I thought, "how on earth am I to know what a space whale would think?", and so I asked ChatGPT 4.5 (which should apparently be very "emotional intelligent"...), and this was literally the first monologue that it gave me (with instructions on its length and how the space whale had been separated from its pod...). I didn't think it was very interesting at first, but then I got to creating the images, and thought they looked so cool that I would give it a go. I managed to find a really high quality voice for the space whale in eleven labs (which luckily had just released their v3 alpha model), and so it all turned out pretty good in the end!

How I created it

I started out simply writing a storyboard, which I literally just did by adding text to an empty capcut project. Then, once I had fledged out the general idea for the images I wanted to generate, I started out by generating the prompts for those images in ChatGPT with the use of my storyboard. Once I had the prompts, I simply ran them one by one until I had all the images I needed. Then I upscaled them in Tapaz Labs, and generated those upscaled images into videos inside midjourney (I wasn't too experienced with using other video models...). Then, I edited it all together, and even added real whale noises to make it more immersive. And the monologue I simply ran through elvenlabs v3 alpha model, after letting it auto-generate the tags for making it more expressive.

Challenges I ran into

It was very hard to get the video where the whale is floating fast over cosmic clouds right... It turned out okay, but it's probably the least "realistic looking" scene in the video... Oh, and also the scene where the space background behind the whale is changing while the whale stays the same, that was a technical challenge... I managed to make it work by simply cutting the whale out in an image editer and adding a green screen background color, and then using the chroma key feature in capcut to remove it and add space background videos behind the whale with transitions between them...

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud that I made an AI short with such a cool concept (in my opinion) as "space whales"... I've never seen anyone else do it, although I've seen quite a lot of digital art of these "space whales". I'm also proud that I made some of the scenes look quite breathtaking (in my opinion...). And I'm proud that the video according to the feedback I've gotten so far feels like "an experience"... that was definitely the intention :)

What I learned

I learned that the idea you have for an AI video matters a lot. With the right idea, even a beginner AI filmmaker like myself can manage to make something that looks cool. So you might say that the idea is sort of like the seed that determines how the "tree" (the video) is going to look and feel...

Built With

• capcut
• elevenlabs
• midjourney
• topazlabs