AI MOVIE MAKING

Open source movie makers live in a world were creativity is free, but time and energy are not.

"Kali" AI music video by Mark DK Berry.

THE GOAL

My goal is to make fully featured movies to rival the big budget studios, but on a home PC using open-source software. At the current trajectory of AI evolution I believe it will be possible to make a Hollywood-worthy blockbuster at home by 2030 and probably a lot sooner. (NOTE: I will be avoiding corporate subscriptions in this approach.)

WHY IT'S IMPORTANT

Traditionally, story-telling was done around a campfire in a tribal compound at the heart of the village. Storys would be told there that could change lives.

In modernity this has been hijacked by big money machines and ideologically driven corporations. The scripts and narratives have became 100% controlled, and the public gets fed only what those powers permit to be created.

But all this is going to change.

Thanks to AI, story-telling is going to be put back into the hands of the people. It wont be long before some kid in a backroom comes up with an amazing visual story and tells it well.

WHAT ARE THE COSTS

Making movies used to cost billions of dollars, tomorrow it will cost only a few hundred dollars. But the real cost of creating will come in time and energy for those that work on making AI movies.

Of course it will need hardware (upward of US$1.5K) and electricity (video rendering burns KWhs), but time and energy are the ongoing costs with AI movie making, especially as it gets more involved.

For example, my first AI video project "Cafe" (seen below) took just 4 days to complete and was a 3 minute music video (I make all the music btw, not AI).

"Cafe" AI music video by Mark DK Berry

All my other AI music videos can be seen on my YouTube Channel in the AI Music Videos Playlist. Each one took a progressively longer time to make.

My eighth AI video took nearly 90 days. It's a 10 minute "narrated noir".

I was averaging about 1 day of work per 5 seconds of video footage. It was a lot of work, and the software is still in it's early days and evolving all the time, which means also taking time out to learn and test new stuff.

So what are the actual costs, and what do you need to make an AI video?

HARDWARE COSTS

A PC capable of handling AI video creation will set you back US$1K for entry level, but you probably have one half way there already. Mine is a Windows 10, 32GB system ram, AMD ryzen 7 CPU, with 850Watt PCU (overkill but I future-proofed when I had spare cash).
A graphics card with GPU and minimum of 12 GB Vram (more is better, and it currently has to be NVIDIA, AMD doesnt work so well). I have the 3060 RTX 12GB VRAM, which is entry level. A good graphics card will cost more than your computer. I would prefer a 3090 RTX with 24 GB VRAM, but it's a big jump up in cost.

The most important aspect of the graphics card for AI movie making is the VRAM, but you might need to upgrade a few other things to make use of it in your existing system, like system RAM, CPU, and power. You need it to stay cool and not overheat while doing hard work 24/7. It won't be like running MS Office and the internet, this will hammer your PC at full steam and it needs to handle that. Still, it can be done for less than US$2K and my current system proves that.

That's really it unless you want to start renting a cloud server, then you are looking at a short term hire cost. There might be times when its actually worth it too, like training video creation models on characters and clothes, or aiming for some super-high-quality video clips. You can also plan ahead and then bulk run a lot of work, and it might be cheaper and faster to do that on a rented server farm.

SOFTWARE COSTS

Nothing. nada. free. (CAVEAT: if you use open source software).

But you will need a decent fast internet service to download probably around 200GB in AI models and extras before you are flying with all engines. And more when new things come out that you just have to test.

I use Comfyui portable version installed on Windows 10 and about 50 different custom nodes that I have found useful for various parts of the process. It's all free. But that means there is no paid support either, so it takes time and self-motivation to learn how it works, or fix it when it goes wrong.

For support, I spend a fair bit of time on Reddit subs r\comfyui and r\stablediffusion looking for help. That's also free, but worth remembering that no one on there owes you anything, help is voluntary and sometimes you cannot find answers nor expect them.
Of course, you can go online instead and buy the big tech subscriptions - and they are usually ahead of open source in capability - but expect to spend a lot of money, and it still wont be easy to make a movie that isnt janky (a technical term you will start to use a lot). And you won't get a lot of support there either.

That's about it, so now check the page on ways to Get Involved