REAL + Ai Video | Filmmakers Hybrid Workflow (LTX Studio)

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, filmmaking breakdowns and cinematography and light 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.

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 all the same. Also just a note if you want to skip ahead to any part of this video I have time stamped 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 lets 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 Cormac McCarthy and 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 storyline 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 storyboards. And to do that, we just click the start button. So let's jump into the storyboard section. These

are my final storyboards 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

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 their 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, et cetera. There's also this create composition button. This will open up a new page where

cetera. 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

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.

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 voiceover 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 auto-generate 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 5am. 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 4, 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 5 is also fully AI generated. Shot

6 is another AI shot. Shot 7 and 8, 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. 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 Ogress, 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 import 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 LTE 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

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 gonna be that fire gene control over character

plausible. And as these tools evolve, it's gonna be that fire gene control over character consistency, location, and environment that's gonna really unlock AI's full potential in filmmaking. And finally, as an experiment, I've uploaded the trailer as a standalone video. So

filmmaking. 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.