The story itself is the core of a film, and choices like non-linear narrative and visual artistry, without traditional storytelling, are all decisions made in the process of telling a story. But beyond the story, every design element that appears in the film is actually telling a story. As a director, everything needs to be designed.
First, as an indispensable part of the story, is the world in which this story takes place. Many domestic works often overlook world-building design, so if your work features a well-crafted world, it will naturally feel familiar to a generation of young people who grew up playing games.
The completeness of world-building might be a key factor in determining whether a work can be developed as a modern IP. We can see that many of the world’s super IPs, such as Harry Potter, Star Wars, DC, and Marvel, all have dedicated people to ensure the unity and continuity of their worlds.
I’m obsessed with world-building settings. My former favorite, “The Lord of the Rings,” is one of the pioneers of this writing approach. The entire fictional world tells stories – that is, the environment where characters live silently narrates stories. For example, in “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,” numerous documents are scattered throughout the environment, telling stories that complement the environmental design.
Therefore, a unified world-building and meticulous attention to world details are indispensable parts of a work. Often, it’s these world-building details that make readers and audiences unable to put the book down. Why is this world like this? How do people live in it? What languages do they speak?
The second storytelling element is who this character is. In AI films, this translates to the design of characters’ appearance and clothing. What a person wears not only reflects the trends of that era but also reflects their inner world – their projection to the outside.
This is especially prominent in science fiction films, as far-future sci-fi often portrays characters who differ from people of our era on Earth. These characters’ clothing needs to be more than just a white T-shirt – it might be made of some futuristic material or fleet uniforms.
Before the emergence of nanoscale controls, we could only use LoRA to control some particularly alien clothing, but with technological development, maintaining consistency in unique clothing will become increasingly simple. This also gives the narrative more expressive space – we can be less obsessed with forcing character consistency because it has already been properly solved.
Scene consistency returns us to world-building design. The architectural design, interior spaces, and outdoor environments of a civilization all tell stories and reflect your artistic taste. Not a single design element in the frame is wasted, but there are conscious and unconscious design elements.
In AI films, this design is sometimes unconscious and AI-generated, as there’s a large amount of information to attend to. However, in conscious design, we must carefully consider the story’s expression. The solidity of world-building design is the foundation of a modern IP.
With scene and character design, there also needs to be an overall tonal design. That is, all designs should have a unified tone – the simplest being unified color grading. Except for specific expressive needs, the film should maintain consistency—emotional consistency.
This is when mood boards and color grading can be used to achieve relative consistency among content generated by multiple AI tools. In the future, one AI tool might be powerful enough to completely handle an entire film, but currently, there are still cross-tool situations, so using color grading to control tonal consistency is essential.
Then there’s music. Films are expressed through audiovisual language, and music is an indispensable part of it. For trailers, for instance, music is edited first, then the visuals. I’m not a professional in the music industry, but I have my own musical preferences. I love Baroque music, so I often incorporate elements of it into my films.
In conclusion, everything is designed. In a good work, not a single design is useless. They are all designed to immerse readers and audiences in a world. Even when occasionally breaking the fourth wall, the story’s immersion is usually uninterrupted.
This means you should strive to keep readers and audiences from breaking out of the experience, allowing them to create their own stories within this world. This is very similar to the experience games provide. I believe the development of games has had a profound and irreversible impact on storytelling, offering us entirely new perspectives to consider.
For a creator, creating a world is a rewarding experience. When I create novels and AI films, I’m excavating stories in the computational universe. Beyond the story, I’m also telling stories. So welcome to this world, world travelers!
Follow me as we explore AI filmmaking together.
