How to Turn Your Poem or Short Story into a Short Film

This is a tutorial on how to turn your poem into a short film using MagicLight.ai.

You start with a MagicLight.ai account, you can get a free trial, or the basic plan is less than $100 a year. 

I like ChatGPT for script conversion for stories or poems because it doesn't add too much extra stuff, and you can tell ChatGPT what length script you want, with additional prompts. Here, I told ChatGPT, "please write this poem into a script for a 3-minute short film set in a hospital."

ChatGPT has created my script, I copy and paste it into Word,  add details here because I want more control over setting and what characters look like.

Now, I'm in MagicLight.ai. The most important thing here is to select on the upper left hand if you want landscape or portrait. Later it will be too late to change once the images are storyboarded in landscape or portrait. Lower left hand side you can see the animation styles. The big box has a smart script and a basic script option--I use the smart script. For animation style, I like Suspense, but the anime and storybook ones are nice, too.

I copy and paste my script into the smart script box, select the duration of the film at the bottom, and click next.

The AI analyzes, then comes up with a lot of scenes. You can read and edit these, or just click next and fix things once you see the images. 

The next step MagicLight.ai generates your characters based on descriptions in your text, but you can go in and edit or regenerate the characters until you're satisfied for free.

You click on the character to edit or regenerate. Using the character prompt you can change their age, clothing, face, build, anything. 

This is my final cast. See if you can fix mistakes before the next step. I didn't notice my nurse is wearing slippers and had to fix those slippers in every scene later on. Clicking next step is a big deal because it costs credits.

Once you've clicked next, the AI generates your storyboard. 

How many scenes you have depends on how long a film you requested when you selected the duration.

Once the initial excitement of seeing your poem come to life has worn off, you notice all the "mistakes" AI has made.

No worries, upper right hand box has the description of each scene, which you can edit and click Re-Gen for free. Regeneration can fix things, or make it worse, completely change the character, it's hit or miss. 

For instance, this girl was a skeleton because there were the words hollow and bony and AI took it literally. I regenerated after removing those words and she was fixed. You can also click on the yellow banana prompt and spend credits to fix something specific. You have to be very specific in your instructions, however. AI will not hesitate to decapitate someone in an overzealous attempt to apply your new changes--you may have to say do not change anything else besides xyz. 

Some of the weird scenes, there's no real explanation...but don't rush to delete a scene out of horror in case you need it as a placeholder in the future. If you have no words in the caption below the image, it won't make it into your final film anyway. If you need it later on, you can completely change the upper right hand prompt and regenerate a new scene out of that placeholder. You can also reorder the scenes by dragging them. 

Once again, AI makes the strangest mistakes. This is not how masks work.

Not sure what genre this is.

I was wondering why AI was struggling so much with blood pressure cuffs and why everything was bloody, then I realized the word "blood" was in there, so I removed that word, and the people were not bloody anymore.

Tinkering with the scenes as well as the captions that will be read out loud in the film will take some time. You can select the voiceover voice that will read the captions. Once you select a voice, it stays consistent throughout the film. 

If you're finally happy with your scenes, captions, and voiceover, click next. 

You can pick subtitles.

You can also pick background music, and how loud you want the music.

Next step you select the specific aspect ratio (remember, landscape or vertical was selected already early on) and resolution. Standard is fine. Clicking Ok takes you to the next step.

Congratulations! You just made your very first short film!

You're probably going to catch little things that need to be fixed. Or big things. No worries, click Back on top and you can go back to before the subtitles and music to your storyboard to fix scenes or typos or AI mistakes or words the voiceover can't pronounce...

Once you're happy with everything, you can download your video from MagicLight.ai and upload to youtube, instagram, facebook, etc. 

Have fun bringing your poems to life in your first short film!