Ep. 50: Unpacking Midjourney's Style Explorer + Slipping Deeper Into Nano Banana 🍌

0:00:00Episode 50?! housekeeping + cold open

Play from 0:00:01 8:88:88 0:00:01 What's up everybody? Midjourney Fast Hours podcast episode 50. We made it. We made it. We made it to 50, man. That's incredible. It doesn't feel like 50, but it also feels like 50 at the same time. Rory, this feels like a great time to drop the like and subscribe. I've remembered to do it early this time, so do your thing, You know what?

0:00:06The “like & subscribe” bit (tell your mom, dog, everyone)

Play from 0:00:27 8:88:88 0:00:27 If you're here and you've watched more than one episode, hit the like and subscribe, even if you haven't. Do it. And then tell your mom and then tell your friends and then tell your dog and your boyfriend, your girlfriend, anyone else who has eyes and ears. You can watch this. qualified as, yeah, yeah, human or a primate. Maybe outside of primates, I don't know. Yeah, we do, we do.

Play from 0:00:53 8:88:88 0:00:53 And we're global. We brought our boy Alar back on the show. was just trying to think, like, Rory, we were trying to do something bigger for 50. We both just kind of ran out of time. But then I hit Alar like an hour ago, and I was like, bro, what are you doing? You want to jump on? And he was like, yeah, man, I'm in. course. So Alar, we did an episode with, uh I don't know, a while back now, but uh ago, it feels like at this point.

0:01:19What’s new + Allar intro; Office Hours headlines

Play from 0:01:19 8:88:88 0:01:19 Yeah. is a construct, I don't even know. But Alar is, if you're not familiar, just another one of those OGs always in the kitchen cooking up something magical with AI. uh He's also well-versed in all of the tools just like us, even outside of Midjourney. I think we're gonna have a fun conversation today. We've got a lot to talk about, I feel like. Midjourney dropped in office hours on Wednesday that had a lot of great things and kind of new things that I hadn't heard before.

0:01:49Style Explorer lands (why it matters for credits)

Play from 0:01:49 8:88:88 0:01:49 And so we can cover that Midjourney also dropped style Explorer last night, which is pretty awesome. Just kind of jumped into that. And I think that's going to help a ton of people just kind of get more activated in using those things. So we can cover that. And then I think we're probably going to get into the whole Nano Banana bananas galore, you know, hype that it's getting right now. It deserves it.

Play from 0:02:14 8:88:88 0:02:14 It's not perfect, but I think. the things that already unlocks right now has changed the game in terms of the workflow, the efficiency, the scaling and all that good stuff too. So we got a lot to jump into. Where do you guys, where you guys wanna go? Where you guys wanna start? Let's start with the style explorer. I think that was a good move. like, I think we should let's let's highlight it because we've been waiting for it. It feels like, I don't know, six months, something at least since it was first mentioned, maybe longer.

0:02:30How it works: SRF codes, Explore tab, filters (Top/Hot/Day)

Play from 0:02:44 8:88:88 0:02:44 But I'm a fan. Right. Like this is so if anyone's not familiar with what Midjourney just released, if you've been in the Midjourney game for a while and you die hard, you definitely use S referendum. And if you do S referendum, you get a you know, type in dash dash s ref and then space random Midjourney will just produce a random style for you. And then you can attach that style code as a, you know, to any image and it'll just automatically apply the style.

Play from 0:03:14 8:88:88 0:03:14 So new listeners, anyone who hasn't done this before, I'm sure most of you have just a little bit of, uh, context there, but then also well Midjourney just released is a explore tab for it. So you can go and look for individual styles that are already created. You don't have to mine your own, which my one opinion on this is I think this is great for the either new users or the users that are on the lower tier subscriptions because you don't have to just waste all your credits mining SRFs.

Play from 0:03:46 8:88:88 0:03:46 That to me was the biggest thing, which I think is again community focused, awesome update, good move on them. Hey, you're right too, Rory. I think we were trying to figure out, because there weren't a lot of details shared up front on what exactly this was and what it meant. mean, the idea, sure, but we didn't know what that was going to take shape in terms of visually or from a UI perspective. And I think you called it where you were like, what if it's just this explore page with just style?

Play from 0:04:13 8:88:88 0:04:13 And I thought, oh, that makes almost too much sense. Because in my mind, I was like, I wonder if they're going to do this where they've got. a certain set that's featured each day or one that's, you know, I had no idea, but I thought when you mentioned that, I was like, oh, that feels like the obvious answer. And that's what they did here. And so you've got this, you know, nested right here with all the other options, right? So for the longest time, Explore Page was just, you know, the images.

Play from 0:04:39 8:88:88 0:04:39 Then when they did video, they added that tab. Now you've got a Styles tab, right? What's a here's a question. Let's let's hit this one right away. I didn't play with this. You're on the style section. Does it filter by top day or is it just it does? yeah, so this does work with all of these. See this so that's a great question. wanted too.

Play from 0:05:05 8:88:88 0:05:05 So it's all in one, right? I think so, you know, em the organization of it, I think, will still be tricky, right? There's still not a great way to sort of like save SRFs that you like. You know, I'm sure like all of us and probably the people listening too, you know, have your favorites. I mean, there are certain ones that you look at and you're like, that's cool. Maybe you use it once and you never go back to it, but there are probably a few you're like, I want to go back to this time and time again.

0:05:07The pain of saving/organizing favorite SRFs

Play from 0:05:32 8:88:88 0:05:32 It's just not a great place to save it. Alar, what do you... uh What do you think about this so far, man? Have you gone in on this and kind of explored it a little bit? Yeah, maybe 10 minutes, 20 minutes before this call, I little bit like see what's going on in here, like tested out a few SREF codes, yeah, scroll around here. But if you refresh the page, it like refreshing everything here?

Play from 0:06:02 8:88:88 0:06:02 Like new SREF codes or is it all the same all the time? You have to scroll through it to find new ones. Yeah. I actually, I actually scrolled through the entire thing last night. So I hit the rock, I hit rock bottom ah because I was just, I was curious like how, yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I was like, is this going to like just be limitless?

0:06:07“Did they rotate styles?” + early content observations

Play from 0:06:27 8:88:88 0:06:27 And then they rotate because there are 4 billion. I don't know how this is going to change, but I think like, because it just dropped last night, I went through the whole thing and there weren't a lot of great ones in there. But I think what's gonna happen, right, is now, uh you know, you've got this random, but you've also got these. So it's going to be easier to find better ones just based on popular opinion. But when I was in it last night, I don't know, Rory, I don't know that Hot was here actually last night.

Play from 0:06:57 8:88:88 0:06:57 I can't remember. It was just top day in random, I think that I saw and likes. And so... That's why I hit rock bottom. didn't see this hot option with some of these. yeah, mean, this is super cool. Do we think that they'll just pump new styles every day and just run like batch processing on it? like, I mean, they could, they could just keep going.

0:07:13Preview layout (character / environment / object)

Play from 0:07:25 8:88:88 0:07:25 I mean, I guess it's, it's so unlimited. I like how they did it though, where it's like basically character environment and then like compilation shot of like object or something like that. Gives you a good like understanding of sort of how everything looks, which is I think better than just putting a person or just putting and environment. You need to see sort of what the breadth, good word there, you like that? With a th, breadth of the style code is.

Play from 0:07:54 8:88:88 0:07:54 uh But I like that because then it's also, it's easy visual, it's constructed. It's not overwhelming, which style codes can be when you run like a ton at one time. But the one thing I will say, which I didn't know, until this week and everyone who's listening is a diehard. It's probably like, he's such an idiot. I had no idea how much raw changed the style code.

0:08:11Surprise: RAW massively changes some styles

Play from 0:08:19 8:88:88 0:08:19 Like if you just, if you hit raw with the style code, like sometimes it can completely change the whole thing. I had no idea. Yeah, like. we could take this, right? um Now this is going to, okay, that's gonna take my last, I think this is taking my last prompt and putting it, applying the style to it, which I don't necessarily know that I want, but I'm gonna take this, apply this. Let's go up here. Well, actually, do we like this one?

Play from 0:08:45 8:88:88 0:08:45 Let's try something else. Let's try something more our style. Give me one. unless... Yes, that upper one was nice. uh Up and left, the blue one. Up, up, up, up, one up. Yeah, that's pretty cool. one? Okay, so let's do this one. So let's take this.

Play from 0:09:12 8:88:88 0:09:12 And yeah, at to Rory's point, why don't we do a few things? Let's run a few different prompts here. Feel free to give me anything guys. Be hands. trying fast. Yes. Okay, let's do let's also do stills archive, which honestly still crushes every time.

Play from 0:09:45 8:88:88 0:09:45 you put the parameter in there with a dash dash Dash, dash, or I forgot about this one because I hadn't used it in a long time. Dash, dash, bracket, like open curly braces or the curly brace thing, comma, raw. Yeah, like I totally forgot about that little hack for the longest time.

Play from 0:10:10 8:88:88 0:10:10 Yeah, just a comma. ah What am I missing? Oh. of what the coding. I don't know that it likes that. Oh, maybe is it a? No, it should be that. Or maybe it's just, um. because maybe it's not the, well, hold on, let's just do this. We'll run it. Yep, let's run it once with, and then we'll run it again.

Play from 0:10:35 8:88:88 0:10:35 Mm-hmm. Is it comma dash dash raw without the duh? I'm just running this. Yeah oops no dash dash needed. It's just a... see? It's just curly braces comma dash dash raw closed curly braces. it. Okay. All right. So then first things first, we did it without raw.

0:10:38The curly-brace RAW syntax gotcha during live tests

Play from 0:11:01 8:88:88 0:11:01 So let's take a look at this. Do you have personalization on for what it's worth? But turn that off for these though. Really? I don't like turning it off for this. But then do you really know what the style looks like? I do for me. Alright, that's good. Alright, we'll go with that one. let's see.

Play from 0:11:28 8:88:88 0:11:28 Yeah, I like these colors. Hmm, that's nice. what were you noticing, Rory, just to explain for everybody as we start to get into the comparing here. So we're going to scroll through standard, and then we'll get into. So somewhere like. I was finding it sometimes it would be like if it was an illustrative style would turn it into a photorealistic style or if it was like a 3d style it would turn it into something a little bit more flat like vector style like it was a it was it was interesting because it was some of them were not too different and some of them were really different but it was just it had no clue that raw played a role in like sort of like the style itself are we we're not in raw now right we're in right this is regular

Play from 0:12:13 8:88:88 0:12:13 there. because I basically stopped using RAW after version 6.1, I think. Or maybe 6. I used to leave it on exclusively and now I'm kind of go back and forth depending on what I'm Alright, so now we've hit raw. now we're getting into raw. Let's see right here.

Play from 0:12:43 8:88:88 0:12:43 I feel like it looks a little... uh I feel like it looks a little flatter, looks a little bit more pushback. I don't know how much different this one is, but. maybe on certain prompts to, just, think like two it's. Let's get into, I think the Porsche one was interesting because...

Play from 0:13:15 8:88:88 0:13:15 I know, I'm not really seeing that big of a difference here. I'm not seeing it here either on this one. you're talking about. I've seen it skew the results quite a bit. I think it happens a lot more with like the sort of like partially illustrative styles than maybe it does with the photorealistic styles. Maybe let's take personalization off. Take that P code off.

Play from 0:13:40 8:88:88 0:13:40 There you go, homie. Hahaha All right. Let's go check this out. Yeah, but I think like this this whole functionality is super cool for a lot of people. I think this is going to be great. ah Now, obviously, I think this is V1. So they're going to make iterations on this. They've already said that. think, you know, are they going to add an element where you can filter styles or colors, right, to make it easier to find things that you want to find?

Play from 0:14:12 8:88:88 0:14:12 I don't think it's necessary. think it would be an efficiency thing. But when you think about it from an explore page in general, they don't have it set up that way with images or videos either. You have to go and search for it. your little smart search feature on any of the styles that you've done if it comes up with similar stuff. m Let's see.

0:14:36Smart Search → Styles hack (the hidden gem)

Play from 0:14:42 8:88:88 0:14:42 So this, let's go in here and if we did this. Oh look at that. Look at that. Nugget. That's a nugget right there. I guarantee nobody knows about that right now. That's sick. There you go. um That's the hack. That's the hack right there.

Play from 0:15:07 8:88:88 0:15:07 Ooh, I like that one on the right with the pink. The three, that one right there. That one looks fun. These ones are much yeah, because then it's like hey, let me find the one style I like and let me find the the distant relative like the close cousins to it here. Yeah, cause these are all. to re-show everyone what you just did there. Just because we were... Yeah. to your point, Rory, what we did was jumped into a style code and went to the Smart Search functionality.

Play from 0:15:42 8:88:88 0:15:42 So this was always a hidden little game changer because you can do this with images too. And that's what it defaults to here. So for example, if I click this and then I click the Smart Search, It's going to show me other Nike shoes that are somewhat in that ballpark. And I've always found that the quality is better when you do the smart search versus doing the search up here in the top, right?

Play from 0:16:09 8:88:88 0:16:09 For Explorer. Now, what we just unlocked though was then changing this tab and selecting styles now. And so now it's taking that close connection from a style standpoint and applying it, which is... is pretty great for an on the spot little discovery here. And I feel like this is all things that you would like now. Like specifically. If you click any of them, then you can just go further with the next style.

Play from 0:16:40 8:88:88 0:16:40 This, yeah, but there's no, it doesn't look like there's an option here to directly do it. So then I would need to run it and then do it again. Meaning like, so if I just did this and I don't know, just do this really quick. I want my personalization back. Hold on, before you do anything, right click on this image real quick.

Play from 0:17:09 8:88:88 0:17:09 Can you send to full, can it be saved to a folder? Hold on. me just take a look and see what all options are so we can like it. We can click to apply directly in the prompt box. If you click Try Style, that will take your last prompt and put it right in. This, think, what is this? OK, that does the same thing as clicking that. And then let's back out, Rory, to your point.

Play from 0:17:36 8:88:88 0:17:36 Is there other options here? No. No. Yeah. Yep. Yep. So then. Again, going back to this, we could go in here, then click this. You've got other monsters. Now you can go into styles. eh It's so good when you want it, or when you need it. It's just like, forget to use it all I Yeah.

Play from 0:18:06 8:88:88 0:18:06 play with the style codes a lot or are you mostly text prompting? depending on the stuff I'm working on, but not much. But if I'm not using SREFs, images tend to be a little bit too blend with just the base model. And also recently I'm using a lot of image prompts and images as SREF codes.

Play from 0:18:34 8:88:88 0:18:34 Okay. Yeah. You're using style reference images is what you're saying. Yeah. And that's always been like one of those things too, where it's like, yeah, you, you know, the style codes are great, but because there was no style explorer, right? It was much easier to just go find an image anywhere across the internet and apply that as a style reference, you know? And then just wait, wait, wait it appropriately.

0:18:34Image as SREF, weighting, and moodboard workflows

Play from 0:19:00 8:88:88 0:19:00 That's the key, right? Like, cause the default is a hundred. Sometimes that may be too strong depending on the image. You just dial that down, right? I have made some, sometimes many different effects or know, textures, know, whatever, blur or you know, 3D kind of crazy, whatever, and then using this as a strap.

Play from 0:19:26 8:88:88 0:19:26 That's the way to do it. It's also the mood boards too. Like, you know, some of the mood boards, like I have all these mood boards for like tokens essentially or camera angles where it's like, you know, I want like this aerial view, but I wanted to like this style code over here on the right, the yellow one. Right? A lot of times the style codes don't necessarily want to do aerial views unless it's like baked in. So it's like you throw that in there and then like bang, it's like, okay, cool.

Play from 0:19:51 8:88:88 0:19:51 There we go. Cause then you can also just dial up, you know, style week. to make sure that it hits and then also hit the Stylize up to make sure the mood board hits and then it's just like a whole big fun exploration in there. This is so cool. I like this though. Now I'm excited about it because you can go and search for like real styles that you like. Yeah, so there you go, right? We don't necessarily need the color filters or the style filters if you've got something like this smart search that that sort of unlocks it.

Play from 0:20:25 8:88:88 0:20:25 I wonder if it's done by, if the smart search is by like more color or more like style. Like if you clicked on an illustrative style, is it going to bring up more illustrative styles or is it going to focus on the any category also like realistic or cinematic or illustration? Yeah, let's test it out. Let's take this one, which is more abstract, right? I'm just going to go ahead and I don't know if this is going to affect it, so I'm going take this out, try style. Now, that's a one click prompt, by the way, so now you can see it's already creating that up here.

Play from 0:20:53 8:88:88 0:20:53 So we'll do that. Let's do another one to your point, just to kind of like dig into this a little bit further. Let's find something that's super unique or is monotone to kind of give us maybe an idea if it's going to group it specifically by color or not. Maybe this blue one. Yeah, good call. that'll give us some information there.

Play from 0:21:20 8:88:88 0:21:20 Alright, so if we go into here. Click this. And click this. All right, so it's gonna be more chaotic in nature. Yeah, it's it's hard to say what it is specifically, but it feels like it's almost like, yeah, like it's taking a word like a chaotic or a maximalism or abstract or something like that and then just. Surfacing these up. This feels like the best way to actually style.

Play from 0:21:48 8:88:88 0:21:48 Yes. in a smart way, efficiently. Yes. They took all of the ideas and they sort of mashed them into one simple UX UI, which is typically what they do. So let's do, let's take this one now, Rory. This is the all blue one. And you do have blue is in most of these, but it doesn't feel like it's as weighted as the style itself for lack of a better category.

Play from 0:22:21 8:88:88 0:22:21 Feels like more medium specific and like visual signature specific. if it's like when you did the more like 3D-ish type look, it was more 3D-ish. The one that was more chaotic seemed to more flat and like it sort of took that. So I'm guessing if you find photorealistic styles you like, you're going to get photorealistic styles in the Explorer. Cool.

Play from 0:22:46 8:88:88 0:22:46 Well, hey, if you're listening to this episode, you just caught a hell of a little shortcut and hack that you won't hear about anywhere else. uh happy hunting on style codes. All right. Yeah, man. So that's awesome. I love that. ah And you can kind of see this, this navigation's really changed a lot over the last few months here.

Play from 0:23:13 8:88:88 0:23:13 I think this was just like three or four things. Now we've got a bunch, right? You've got mood boards broken out here. um Was edit always, I guess edit was here. um Chats, chat's been here. Yeah, maybe it was that that I'm thinking of. Interesting. Cool. are continuing to, they are continuing the rollout. So they have promised that and it has been delivered on.

Play from 0:23:39 8:88:88 0:23:39 Something new every week. Yeah, mean, so, I mean, this piece of it we just covered. um V71 in testing, key improvements, enhanced prompt understanding, better OREP functionality and improved draft mode serves as testing ground for V8 features at smaller scale. All right. Good. That's kind of like, yeah.

0:23:40Office Hours: v7.1, OREF improvements, draft mode, v8 path

Play from 0:24:04 8:88:88 0:24:04 improved prompt understanding, I don't even care about anymore. um I really don't care about it anymore. uh Like I would rather you stopped improving the prompt understanding, I think at this point. I just like the way that mid-journey currently is coherent. only using one word and it's ref code and that's it. So I'm saying, and then we talk about this all the time. It's just like the magic of mid-journey kind of filling in the gaps creatively on prompts versus totally verbatim.

Play from 0:24:37 8:88:88 0:24:37 And I think we all really like that, just the three of us. I'm speaking collectively here. But I think that's probably one of the best parts about mid-journey. So that's what I'm saying is, I mean, better prompt understanding maybe when it comes to like, I'm thinking like video and maybe like those. those manual updates that you make with mid-journey video maybe, but I don't, it's not a big standout thing for me beyond that. I am interested in that better OREF functionality, right?

Play from 0:25:03 8:88:88 0:25:03 Because it's just like, well now, you know, we got to take everything outside of mid-journey and kind of go into Nano Banana. You know what I mean? uh The speaking of that, that's where I'd like the better prompt understanding is in the editor. Like sometimes it's so hard just to be like, I want a white background. Like I'm extending something with a white background with a white background. And it's like, let me add a palm tree. I'm like, I don't want the palm tree. I just want white fucking background. That's the only thing that frustrates me.

Play from 0:25:30 8:88:88 0:25:30 Like it's so hard where it's like, oh add a, you know, add a person and it just like doesn't do it. But when you say just white background, it's like, let me add a person. That's the only complaint I have with prompt understanding at this point. Alar, what do you think, man? now all good Doesn't really affect you.

0:25:48v8 is the big model rev; video waits until v8 ships

Play from 0:25:57 8:88:88 0:25:57 Then you've got V8 planned for release this year. I think that's probably the real thing here. uh Described as a really huge model revision. So they're still very enthusiastic and optimistic about how big that leap is. No specific feature announcement yet. Described as aggressive and ambitious. Yeah. And then they did make it known to an office hours that they're not gonna touch the video until V8's live.

Play from 0:26:25 8:88:88 0:26:25 So I wouldn't expect anything in terms of like big changes or really anything significant or worth mentioning until after V8s. cool. Still good right now. Like having the SD or HD option, like the batch sizing down to one so I can just test it and don't have to re-up for the seventh time this month, which is where think I'm at already. Alar, are you using mid-journey video at all?

0:26:49Midjourney Video: manual vs auto; motion vs loop

Play from 0:26:53 8:88:88 0:26:53 Yeah, a lot. It's really cool and the prompt accuracy in the video, it's so good. It does almost everything I have tried. Like crazy cool stuff. Are you a go ahead Roy, go ahead. I was just going to ask her. Are you are you finding yourself doing more just automatic generations or more manual prompting when it comes to the video part?

Play from 0:27:26 8:88:88 0:27:26 I think manual, Sometimes depending on if I'm maybe too lazy or maybe there is just a car scene or something like a simple movement or something, I'm just hitting automation and see what's going on. But if I need really something specific, for example, I had one fashion scene. I made a female doing some, I don't know, dance movement or something like that. Then I extended the video and added like Black Panther's...

Play from 0:27:53 8:88:88 0:27:53 circling around the female and then the camera like pulled down and shows exactly like they're doing circular motion running around the female and I was super surprised about this accuracy. It's interesting with video, like for... I was doing this with SRFs the other day, trying to find like a generic enough prompt that will work for image and video at the same time.

Play from 0:28:20 8:88:88 0:28:20 So if you hit auto prompt, it'll work. Like I was doing like synchronized dance as like the SRF mine or like music video dance sequence as the SRF mine and then just hitting auto prompt and it was... whatever... Mid-Journey crushes on synchronized dance. it just... Dude, it works every time. I was like, this is crazy. It's a fun one. Yeah, it's awesome.

Play from 0:28:45 8:88:88 0:28:45 I don't know how it works so well, but it does. So does music video dance sequence. It's a great, good prompt for images. It's like all baked in with motion and it's never really like static. And then bang, hit auto prompt and go. So hey, another way to prompt. Yeah, I mean, I've found myself doing more like early on I was just kind of like curious about how I think mid journeys model would just interpret the auto, know, low motion, high motion and then same with the looping.

Play from 0:29:16 8:88:88 0:29:16 um Whereas now I'm just, yeah, I'm finding myself it's like if I have anything specific in mind, right, I have to do it manually. um And I mean, I still I still test them both, you know, but. I'm going with four videos at the time or one or two. I'm usually just running four.

Play from 0:29:42 8:88:88 0:29:42 Yeah, me too. I'm just spamming this video button like many times. Like I'm not satisfied with the one run. I'm just rerun, rerun, rerun. Okay, that's nice. And there we go. It's tough. with the difference too between the video, low motion, high motion and the loop, low motion, high motion. Cause they give you totally different types of outputs too. I wouldn't even, you know, versus maybe you're thinking low motions, low motion, high motions, high motion.

Play from 0:30:13 8:88:88 0:30:13 But I mean, those act in completely different ways. How about the HD or non HD video? Like which one you prefer? Which one you prefer? I don't know that I have a preference on that. mean, obviously, HD costs more, right? So it's like, from that perspective, you probably don't want to run everything in HD.

0:30:23SD vs HD trade-offs (costs, quality)

Play from 0:30:40 8:88:88 0:30:40 But then there's not a good way, though, if you like something and you ran a gen and you like it in SD, you can't go back up to HD in mid-journey, you know, which, so. HD is good. I really like it. I just I find it hard to run so many of them because then I'm like, all right, I'm burning literally all of my hours. I like that it's some of the stuff is, you know, the lower res.

Play from 0:31:06 8:88:88 0:31:06 And it's like I can run a lot of it so I can just have, you know, get more video because all the video tools are so damn expensive right now. It's like never ends. But is this a is this lower high motion? motion high. I see. There you go. Yeah. this makes sense to have like a different credits separated for us only for video just to burn for the video and leave the images alone or doesn't make sense I would like it because sometimes I'm doing like a bunch of batch images for certain things.

Play from 0:31:41 8:88:88 0:31:41 And then I get to the time when I want to generate video and it's like I generate three videos and it's like, you used all your credits this month. I'm God damn it. And you know, granted Midjourney, just take my money. It's fine. Like, you know, I'll pay for more. just, hate the, if there is anyone from Midjourney listening, just give me a bigger top-up plan, like than $20. or whatever it is for five hours. that goes, you could use that five hours in like 30 minutes.

Play from 0:32:09 8:88:88 0:32:09 And maybe like, you know, I think they have explored that with, maybe it was the leaderboard with like suggesting ideas, right? But it was, I think that cost should be cheaper for people that have higher plans, you know, to top up, I think. There should be a discounted rate there. Yeah. So, yeah, it's interesting. Like this one, I added a little bit of a manual prompt too.

Play from 0:32:35 8:88:88 0:32:35 This was already a very simple prompt. um But I had success with both. That's why I'm kind of running both in a lot of ways where, you know, like, think this one was, let's see, this is just like an auto-gen. Are you going straight without any upscale, without any editing with original images to video in mid-journey or you're editing enhancing skin or whatever and then going back to mid-journey?

0:33:04When to upscale before animating (text handling quirks)

Play from 0:33:06 8:88:88 0:33:06 I think I'm not sure I'm doing it the best way, meaning like, I think the best way would be probably, right? Whatever tool you're gonna use to completely upscale it, then bring it back into Midjourney. But that's just like a pain in the ass. So I think for me, what I'm doing is I'm just upscaling and then doing it. You know what I mean? You know, there are ways to obviously do, yeah, get the better quality, I think on top of that, but.

Play from 0:33:34 8:88:88 0:33:34 The video side, it's so weird because some of the stuff is the SD can be so, I don't want to say pixelated, but it looks like it's, if you don't upscale it, it takes the artifacts into account because it's so coherent. It's like thinking that it's the style, you know what I mean? Because it can take any style and animate it pretty much.

Play from 0:34:01 8:88:88 0:34:01 So it's just being coherent. This was an SD. You can tell it's just a little bit more smooth. This one was interesting though, because I took this final image. This has already got the typography in it. Just to see, it does kinda skew that, right? So don't know, maybe I could run that in HD also to see if that helps, but.

Play from 0:34:27 8:88:88 0:34:27 It's interesting because it didn't really move the text at all, just sort of like regenerated it. some it did. I think these ones, like it really didn't too much, but I think maybe in this next one, this one does, this thing moves a little bit. Now... and this here. Huh. It looks kinda cool though. Yeah. mind it though. Yeah, so that's interesting.

Play from 0:34:55 8:88:88 0:34:55 mean, these are SD to your point, right? Then again, I wish I could go back and HD it, but. That'd a good little... um I'm excited to run permutations on videos if they want to ever add that feature. So I could do SDHD at the same time, like, could change camera angle or motion or whatever.

Play from 0:35:23 8:88:88 0:35:23 um Again, just let me burn through my hours. That's all I want. Right. Yeah, that's pretty interesting with the video stuff. They also mentioned on em office hours caught some of this, but about profiles. It looks like they're gonna lean into profiles now. We all have back-end profiles, but they're not anywhere on the site.

0:35:29Profiles, friend rooms, global rooms, prompt battles

Play from 0:35:50 8:88:88 0:35:50 Like, so I think these are hidden somewhere like here. Is it account? Yeah. So like this is my public profile, right? And my username and my ID. But this isn't something that uh you would be able to see, right? uh Unless you were logged in. And I think what they're talking about is maybe expanding this into more of a community-based thing, I think.

Play from 0:36:21 8:88:88 0:36:21 So they're gonna, I think start with profiles and then they're gonna start to... Enable a full profile, which I I don't know again They don't they never give us a ton of information here but I would imagine allows you to maybe connect or follow or Kind of bring people into a little bit of a circle a community aspect if you will with the profile system Otherwise, why would you do that? I don't other than that.

Play from 0:36:47 8:88:88 0:36:47 I can't think of why that would be necessary, but Good move. That's it. That's my comment. That's all I got for that one. I think that's awesome. It looks like that's on for maybe they're targeting a month there. um Some other community features. rooms. Interesting. I wonder if that's the actual rooms, like in the chat, or if that's like a different sort of place that they're gonna build.

Play from 0:37:18 8:88:88 0:37:18 web based prompt battle system in development. Cool. Discord dude, I went on discord yesterday to try because I was I was in queue like I thought I thought I broke mid-journey I was like in queue for like 30 minutes So I went into discord and I almost forgot I had to type backslash imagine. I hit the prompt and it's like nothing like nothing happened Yeah, I hit the problem.

0:37:26Discord nostalgia: forgetting “/imagine” (oops)

Play from 0:37:47 8:88:88 0:37:47 Nothing happened. I was like, That's right, I know though, The imagine days. just felt bad about it. ha ha. What's some? I think that's pretty much it. But I thought the profile thing was interesting, Style Explorer. blah blah blah. Let's just call it what it is. Banger update.

Play from 0:38:13 8:88:88 0:38:13 I have personal opinion. Really like it. Happy they did it this way. Happy it turned out this clean. And now there's just a whole another way to play around with Midjourney again. Yeah, yeah. Do you guys wanna jump into the naner? The Nano Banana? I need it. Little potassium fix for the end of the episode about it.

0:38:22Nano Banana deep dive: why it’s workflow-changing

Play from 0:38:38 8:88:88 0:38:38 uh We've all three played with it. We did kind of cover a little bit of like that last week in terms of our impressions, some of the things that you're capable of, any other like new thoughts for either of you guys in terms of how it's, how you're using it, when you're using it. Is it an essential part of people's workflow now? Should it be? You know, like let's answer maybe some of those questions people are thinking about that. either have just dipped their toe in the water or they haven't tried it yet.

Play from 0:39:07 8:88:88 0:39:07 Alar, I'll let you go with this one. Yeah, there is a lot of possibilities, especially for cinematic or short films or making these different angles from one scene, from one image and build the world out of it. It's crazy valuable to make these different angles. And yeah, I'm a big fashion guy now.

Play from 0:39:32 8:88:88 0:39:32 You can put whatever clothing on whatever style of model wearing the garment. or clouding, it's really valuable. are the first, like, or, I think, like, obvious ways to use it. But I actually, I also tried to use it. I feed it like four different mid-shown me, uh, stref images or similar style images to NanoBanana and tried to use those as, uh, stref images or reference images to get similar style.

Play from 0:40:06 8:88:88 0:40:06 But, uh, Sometimes it works, sometimes not too much, it took some elements to make a similar style of images also. It's a good, I like that. I like the multiple images as a style reference. should really drive it home for it. But it's tough, because mid-journey aesthetics is hard, right? It's not what every other image generator does. gives, yeah, yeah, it gives different kind of vibe.

Play from 0:40:33 8:88:88 0:40:33 Some details bring in, but it's, yeah, it's different. Where are you using NanoBanana at when you're using it, Alar? First I was using it in Freepik, then in Treia, then Google AI Studio. the... is a... I've... this is a weird observation. I've also used it in a few places and I feel like FreePic has really good quality for some reason when it comes...

0:41:01Aspect-ratio hiccups & hacks in Freepik

Play from 0:41:01 8:88:88 0:41:01 like I feel like the quality is better. I don't know why. of been. I had the same feeling and also same feeling with the aspect ratios. It was really hard to get the right aspect ratios from the original image that I'm editing, maybe adding some elements and it wanted to give me a square size or random size, maybe 16 by 9 size, but not the original size. And that's still like a little bit issue for me.

Play from 0:41:28 8:88:88 0:41:28 Maybe someone have like a hack for that. But yeah. Can I make a comment on FreePix UX for this? I found it very confusing. Is that just me, like, inputting the image and then like... It feels complicated. have all these other options here too, which is interesting. was kind of, I mean, I didn't go deep into this, but I was kind of toying around with this too, where it was like, oh, okay, they have styles.

Play from 0:41:58 8:88:88 0:41:58 Okay, right? And then, so you could technically say apply that and then prompt on top. But I'm not sure if it works with every model, the style. could try that on this call because I haven't done that specifically, but what I did notice here was this create style option. And it was like, okay, well, you need to add images, the quality here, it costs 3000 credits, but you've got this sort of like trained style.

Play from 0:42:32 8:88:88 0:42:32 It's like, okay. Yeah, so there was that. And then there was, you know what the other interesting thing was Rory was this. Was it, no, it wasn't stopped here. Let me take this off. This wasn't here when I last used it. No. Where was this at? was, um see they got color and lighting, framing.

Play from 0:42:58 8:88:88 0:42:58 was, there was was a. thing here, maybe it was composition is not compatible with reference images. ah There was something though that gave you options for the camera angles. Because there was an aerial version that I was playing around with on some of these. Because I was like, I wonder if I can just click that. Does that help with the coherence or what?

Play from 0:43:24 8:88:88 0:43:24 ah have here. also... the I-SPEC ratio too, it allows for that? Yep, so you could change that here. but it doesn't work all the time. Sometimes I think it doesn't have this. Okay, okay. Okay, okay. my image references were 16,9. So maybe if that doesn't match, I don't know if that messes it up. It does say this, still in beta may not always respect the aspect ratios.

Play from 0:43:53 8:88:88 0:43:53 Hmm. Huh. But you have this, is interesting. And then there's also this nice little feature where it's like, OK, let me click in here. And you can edit the image. Right? you can do like inpainting with nano. Whaaaat? here.

0:44:15In-app inpainting & reference characters in Freepik

Play from 0:44:20 8:88:88 0:44:20 You know, and then what are these? So add reference, use character. So, I mean, again, I haven't gone extremely deep to test all these things out, but if those things work, then I think FreePic adds a really interesting layer to this because that's FreePic's capability stacked on top of the model, right? I don't know what these other, you know. options have. I have seen some interesting use cases with Nano on Higgs field, but I haven't really been using Higgs field.

Play from 0:44:52 8:88:88 0:44:52 Yeah, me also, but have you tried this new stuff some guy builds for Photoshop, Nano Banana Photoshop plugin? Is it good? Okay. Pull it up on X. Just search it. Because it looks good. I know a lot of people were using it. ah I love that. Did I save that on? I might've saved that on Instagram actually.

0:45:00Nano Banana Photoshop plug-in (enable & flow)

Play from 0:45:19 8:88:88 0:45:19 Damn. this is just for highlighting some areas, brushing out the areas. See, this is, it's so weird to watch other people retrofit Photoshop to what Photoshop should be and be doing. It's like, Photoshop should be thinking like FreePic is, like, I'm just gonna bring everything in and you can just do what you want in here. So here, me take this back to the beginning.

Play from 0:45:57 8:88:88 0:45:57 So it's just a nice little plug-in, makes it nice and easy. They had the perfect, they had the perfect oppo for a banana there, not a thing of flowers. It's perfect. That's actually where I got the idea from. This, yeah, wish I, uh damn, I wish I had my password for Instagram. I don't wanna share my screen and be trying to figure that out for five minutes.

Play from 0:46:23 8:88:88 0:46:23 But I did save, I uh think it was on Instagram. Somebody posted about this. They did a really good video though of showing how you turn this on. So you actually have to go somewhere to turn this on within Photoshop. It's not hard, but I think you do have to do that first. It's just nice. Like again, it's great to have Photoshop be usable with certain things.

Play from 0:46:48 8:88:88 0:46:48 You're just not reliant on their native tools. It's smart integration. Just keep doing it that way. advanced search took me about five years to know there was an advanced search. Yeah I was like wait, come on Yeah. Let's see, if we can find this, maybe we'll find it.

Play from 0:47:16 8:88:88 0:47:16 now. ah There's probably like, you know, this would be so legit in so many different ways. Like I would love to have nano type functionality in mid, like that's how like, ref should work. You know I mean? In Midjourney, like that's how it can work.

Play from 0:47:42 8:88:88 0:47:42 It should work. I wonder if they're going to, with the new updated ref, they're going to allow multiple inputs. not just one. Yeah, I think you got to go up to plug in at the top in Photoshop and then turn this on. Like there's some sort of drop down. Well, this. gotta go into Photoshop, go up to plugins.

Play from 0:48:07 8:88:88 0:48:07 think there's something where you select this, there's something to select with Nano Banana and Flux or something like that and then boom, pops in there. Wonderful. Keep the fun times going because this stuff just became more professional, right? Like all of that hacking around Lora's to get to a certain like, you know, product consistency, art direction, anything like that. Now it just became real and you can have, you know, a finishing piece of it where the editing isn't as extreme.

0:48:25Pro tip: consistency over heavy retouching

Play from 0:48:39 8:88:88 0:48:39 it's just been so good. And I keep seeing new ways of people using it. It's just really smart. saw some people doing face swapping doesn't tend to work so great if you've noticed that at all. um It takes a little bit more of like the Photoshop or the free pick approach to kind of get it good. But there's Where is this? I thought I had one other one saved.

Play from 0:49:04 8:88:88 0:49:04 Yeah, so mean that like even to the point though, the fact that that's now available in Photoshop, that opens this capability up to even more folks that maybe were a little bit more allergic to some of these AI tools. Now you just do it right in Photoshop. I we should definitely get into one of those posts on LinkedIn this week. I feel like there was a lot of good little nuggets in there from the last experiment because there's a lot of good broken out stuff.

Play from 0:49:33 8:88:88 0:49:33 We were just kind of like I showed you that that figma where I just kind of pulled all the images together, but I hadn't done anything with it. And you could just see what I was doing in free pick there. But like in like to be fair, this is nothing complicated. By the way, this is just me getting in and experimenting. I wasn't trying to create anything epic here or do anything complex. It was just really just for my own. curiosity, just trying to figure out what's possible and then I'm just sharing it here, right?

Play from 0:50:01 8:88:88 0:50:01 So the whole goal with this was to really do a few things, right? Like Nano Banana is now taking over a lot of the things that ChatGBT could do, right? And that's why ChatGBT's image gen really changed the game because it was like, you couldn't do, hey, I've got a thumbnail and now I can swap my own self in there and, you know, like do crazy stuff that you could never do before. Well, this is that, right? Except it's faster.

Play from 0:50:27 8:88:88 0:50:27 It's faster. ah The quality is better. You get away from that sort of warm color that JATGVT is famous for. And so this was really cool because I basically just kind of pulled all these things out. What can it do? We talked about text to image, but some of the people were asking questions, well, where did you get the seed image that was from Midjourney? think that's probably all three of our preference.

Play from 0:50:52 8:88:88 0:50:52 You start with Midjourney and then you can sort of like... take that quality and that creativity and then scale it out using something like this. You can use more than one image as references. You can iterate, do stuff with text, right? So this was me taking one seed image and then building out sort of like this mini world, if you will, just by doing some additions, subtractions, changes, et cetera. So started with that initial image, added a backpack, pretty easy.

0:50:54World-building workflows: zooms, angles, new actions

Play from 0:51:21 8:88:88 0:51:21 I tried first with... actually having a specific backpack image in mind. And I was having some problems proportionally getting that to look and feel right. Even after sort of like saying things very clearly about make this proportional, blend the colors, stuff like that. oh It was okay. Whenever I just didn't care about what, the backpack, just black backpack, boom, right in there.

Play from 0:51:47 8:88:88 0:51:47 Remove black backpack, change the expression on the man's face. These are all... really easy things to do. You can tell these prompts are very short. They're very natural language. There's nothing complicated about this. Anybody can do this. So that was pretty interesting. Then, you know, kind of going into to zoom, right? Creating some additional angles here, different perspectives. Now let me keep him in the same spot. Let me just change the action, right?

Play from 0:52:13 8:88:88 0:52:13 So without changing the background, make the subject blank with a blank as, you know, expression and fill in the details. So I was kind of like, okay, let me do something that would normally fit in the scene. Let me do something that's a little bit more crazy, like put on a Peloton in front, know, his front yard kind of thing. And then, you know, these were pretty much one shots. I think I maybe ran these once or twice max on the actions. It was really good with that.

Play from 0:52:40 8:88:88 0:52:40 Then I changed the camera angle a few times. These were a little bit tougher, but still a couple iterations, pretty easy. Some are easier than others. you know, I thought, um you know, this is where it can kind of, when you're going for consistency across multiple scenes, this is where it starts to get tough, right? Because if you do a scene like, a shot like this, now you're giving the audience so much more information that it didn't see.

Play from 0:53:07 8:88:88 0:53:07 And now you gotta make sure that that information is consistent in all the other images, right? So I saw those holes. I don't know that other people saw those holes, but like, that's a very real thing. So there are limitations here. It's not, this is not. perfect, right? Because uh to last week, sort of the same theory, right? Different application with the car, where it's like, if I want to create all these different variations of the car image, if I don't have a specific reference for the same back of the car, every time, like if you do a front version of the car or a front three quarter version, you don't have no clue what the back looks like.

0:53:20Consistency challenges: missing doors, mismatched details

Play from 0:53:41 8:88:88 0:53:41 And if you just keep generating angles of it, it's going have a different back every time because it has no frame of reference. So that exactly what you're saying. Same theory. And one comment on the prompting here. which is really good. Like it's just a good thing to highlight. Where it says change the camera angle to ground level. think a lot of people would stop there. Angles focus on the subject's white shoes. Like you're adding the focal point of reference, right? It's the same thing in conjunction, know, male subject in his home in conjunction with the rest of the neighborhood.

Play from 0:54:08 8:88:88 0:54:08 Like that's what helps move it. Because if you just say change the low, like a low angle, a lot of times it's just like, eh, maybe. Yeah. a good point. And I think like, don't even know if I, that was probably one of the first ones I did with the angle. And I think the reason I did that is because I had the idea that I wanted to kind of put like this blood splatter on his shoe. uh So I had something in mind. If I didn't, I don't know that I would have done it. I mean, maybe, but I think that's a really good point though.

Play from 0:54:36 8:88:88 0:54:36 Because the way that I think about giving these models information is I try to almost do it more than once. You know, like I say something once, but I'll maybe say it in a different way or reiterate it in a different way to just strengthen the chance that I'm going to get it. Right. So to your point, I've got the ground level camera, which you would think, right, would, would focus on the ground level and his shoes would be in the shot. But I also set it, you know, explicitly.

Play from 0:55:03 8:88:88 0:55:03 So, yeah, but this is a really good point though, because I was getting like a second door here sometimes, right? It's like, well, then I don't want to do that. Cause now the second door has got to be there in all of them, right? Not that there would ever be two doors there anyway, but it's like, yeah, that's something you got to watch out for. um Same here. This is another interpretation of that shot, right? So this has got to look similar to this.

Play from 0:55:29 8:88:88 0:55:29 If it doesn't, right, you're going to start to have holes in your story here that aren't super consistent. This one was nice though, because you could see this chair's here. Chair looks the same here. More detail. That was just to go back to that window prompt that actually translated really well. Like I was looking at it from. Yeah, like it really outpainted.

Play from 0:55:58 8:88:88 0:55:58 solid. That's probably the that's probably one of the better ones I've seen with keeping the actual that full image one. Yeah. That one was a little bit tougher, I will say, right? To get right, cause you had this and then you also have, you have two scenes here, you know, really, because this foreground scene is an entire scene. It's not just a foreground element, this is a whole scene. So sometimes you'd get this stove in a weird spot or, you know, something was off, but this is nice.

0:56:00Adding characters & branded clothing to complex scenes

Play from 0:56:29 8:88:88 0:56:29 And it's like, well shit, you know, like I gotta match both of these things here. So that's where it's like, do I run it again? Do I wanna go in and... touch it and edit it and paint whatever you want to do. yeah. Solid. And then this one, know, add character. I had done like a bunch of scenes, but then I forgot. was like, well, I should just build this character out with the same clothes, right? To reiterate that that can be done. And so that's what I did was then took this and said, hey, look, I want, you know, this guy dressed in this and now he's in three different scenes here.

Play from 0:56:59 8:88:88 0:56:59 Yeah. So this solves another major problem because a lot of times you have this issue with if you have multiple characters in one image, right, and you want them to be consistent. A lot of times you can only reference one, you know, and then it becomes harder. I had a really hard scene I had to make for a client where I had to place maybe six people sitting around the campfire. They all are wearing branded clothing and behind them are branded cars as well.

Play from 0:57:30 8:88:88 0:57:30 example, Land Rover is behind them. So I told them, man, this is going to be a little bit too crazy to lock in every... every detail consistency in one image it was like many months ago. But today maybe with Nano Banana maybe even doing these characters one by one and then feeding them back in the one scene like these characters with branded clothing and then adding the car behind them.

Play from 0:57:57 8:88:88 0:57:57 That way maybe now this type of crazy shots can work also. See, that's another good thing, right? Cause it's like, there was, um I don't think I've got it in here. I've got it in the other image, but I've got another image where there's like four guys and they're rolling dice. And I'm wondering if you took that with that many variables and then applied, you know, to keep the character consistency, how well it would do with that.

0:58:20Character sheets + compositing tricks for consistency

Play from 0:58:22 8:88:88 0:58:22 I didn't go that far. So here's a little hack for that. I'm thinking in terms of Weeby, because this is where I've done it, but I'm sure you can do this with any other software. It's like, a lot of times I'm generating like a character sheet. Like, so it's like a bunch of different like body positions and stuff that it can be in. And you remove the background and you can just composite all of them. So you can put the four or five characters in there. So it's really like clear, high res, exactly who the characters are, and then use nano to sort of like smooth it out and be like, all right.

Play from 0:58:52 8:88:88 0:58:52 Now they're in the scene, like add the lighting and everything else. it's, it's, that's a way if you need to have like five different variables in there, like five characters and a car that needs to be specific. Like I would think about it, like, you know, I would be generating this guy probably, you know, in like some sort of like regular position or whatever. It depends on what the action is, but if you wanted to put five people around, you can sort of composite it the traditional way.

Play from 0:59:17 8:88:88 0:59:17 And then even with the 2D stuff, what's crazy is then if the hero shot or the main shot is ready, for example, the campfire, then you can make different angles from this scene, like behind the shoulder or another angle or maybe drone shot for the same scene. Yeah, because what's cool now with a lot of the video generators, I don't know, maybe never tried it before. If I was to like, if I was to like cut this, you the guy out who's holding the teddy bear, right, and just like put him in another scene, but not relight him, like just like drop him in 2D looking like a collage.

Play from 0:59:53 8:88:88 0:59:53 It's like Vio specifically just picks it up and runs with it. It's like he's part of the scene. Like it doesn't even matter that he's cut out, like die cut. You know what I mean? It just like adds him in. It's like, yeah. He's in the scene. You don't have to like really go and blend it that far. Done that with a lot of things lately. So that's another little hack. If anyone's using VO3 for that kind of stuff. compositing in general, I feel like just got disrupted like a mug this this year through all of these tools.

1:00:09Compositing disruption: Photoshop harmonize & Nano

Play from 1:00:21 8:88:88 1:00:21 mean, the harmonize feature in Photoshop. Now you got this in there. Photoshop's coming back after being after being away for I felt like three years. Yeah. But dude, this is a great, this is a great talking piece. Like just the way that you did this, just to, just to give you, give you the flowers on this one. It's a great thing to look at. It's like easy for us to go through this kind of stuff too.

Play from 1:00:48 8:88:88 1:00:48 And just like, all right, the prompts, you can see how simple they are. They don't have to be crazy, but they're direct and they're clear and they're, they're specific. So it's like, really, and you tested a lot of different stuff, which is exactly what you need to do when you're building things like this. this is, think, one of those things too, where the first time you do this, you're gonna have some holes in here. Here's another variable that I would need to keep in mind. I've now shown this other side here, right, of this scene.

Play from 1:01:17 8:88:88 1:01:17 So if I show that side of the scene again, it needs to be this, right? So those are just some of the things that you're gonna have to look out for when you're trying to build out, I guess, several of these things. Here's a, you know. turning him, here's moving him, having him go back the other way, new subject, did well with that. I mean, the colors are great.

Play from 1:01:42 8:88:88 1:01:42 The color consistency, yeah, to your point, it's great. I didn't even have to think about that. It's really 100 % if you look these three grids up here, it's like 100. Here I see like I just see an error here too, right? So this one, right? You've got this boarded up thing. There's nothing here, right? So again, the image was, whatever the input image was. If it's the one above it with the guy walking away, he's covering that spot, right? So it's going to generate it, it's all the input now.

1:02:12Time-lapse edits (dust, rust, lighting changes)

Play from 1:02:13 8:88:88 1:02:13 I the runway references should have been Nano Banana, I think. Because if I remember correctly, I haven't used it long time ago, but it was for similar use case, like Nano Banana. To get different angles, they said, OK, OK, but it's not working that powerfully, I think. not it's not at the nano level with the with the micro details like that's where nano really wins it's the micro stuff but the other the other thing that is interesting I don't know if you tried it on this one like as even as a simple prompt like I've been testing like make it three hours earlier in the day or make it three hours later in the day so you

Play from 1:02:58 8:88:88 1:02:58 can change the lighting and like things like that if you're doing like time-lapse yeah and then using end frame and last frame to get the nice motion. Yeah, it's cool because now keyframes again with the improvement of this and then having the improvement of things like cling with keyframes. It's like, we can like really direct this thing now. It's like a lot less up to chance than it used to be. I also made some tests, something like that.

Play from 1:03:24 8:88:88 1:03:24 uh Car are placed in the garage. Then you can add some dust on it. Then you can add trash on it. Then you can add a rusty bicycle on it. And then you can, like, if you want, can animate it, make the car rusty or, you know, everything, like. uh Dude, that's cool. That's a good idea. I like that. I like the time lapse effect with the nano edits. yeah. too, yeah, I like that. That's a cool idea with the time.

Play from 1:03:50 8:88:88 1:03:50 Huh. All right, we got a lot of new ideas coming out of this one now. If you are still new to this and haven't used this tool, like here's one other important thing, right? If I'm gonna put this in a new location, I've created, let's say this is the first image I create, now I'm gonna use this as the image ref, right? So there are just, you know, there are different decisions like that that may be intuitive, but just something to keep in mind, right?

Play from 1:04:15 8:88:88 1:04:15 I wouldn't wanna use the same image ref I used for this here. um after I've created this one. Maybe before I created this one, unless I've got a specific scene in mind, but once I've created this, now I've created a new pathway that I have to stay true to, which means that I gotta use this one, right? So anyway, yeah, I think that's pretty much it, Rory. think the, yeah, yeah.

1:04:39True world-building: multiple lives & story arcs

Play from 1:04:42 8:88:88 1:04:42 This is what I see as the first stage of actual world building. Like, you know what I mean? This stage one. Genie feels like stage two with the real-time VR, but this is like, you can go in any direction. You can just keep taking this. Like, this is a whole world now. You know, could flash to the other side of town and start a whole new story here. Right? Like, this is like the Marvel cinematic universe.

Play from 1:05:09 8:88:88 1:05:09 inside here now. It's whatever. Which is what was crazy. is like I could you could stay with one thing for a long time. I mean, this could you could build this out, you know, again, to be a story and really go in and create all motion between all those scenes that we made. And, you know, yeah, there's a lot there's a lot to do. their lives, every single one of them can have a different life and you can control every single one of them, right? Like this is where it feels this is where it starts to get weird.

Play from 1:05:36 8:88:88 1:05:36 yeah, can make episodes of the series. Imagine if you could watch the same television series, but told from like five different perspectives. So like if you had the choice of like main character or like supporting character, and you're like seeing the same movie through like the different, like, you know, if you would go through the whole progression of the story, but you're seeing it from different vantage points, or like you're not part of one scene that's happening in the background.

Play from 1:06:04 8:88:88 1:06:04 There's a, you know, it's like video games, but for... But for like cinema now you can, you can just sort of replicate this is cool. I love this tool, man. This is a great, great thing to have at our disposal. edit Yeah, this is you can see here. this changed the scene, even though I provide an image reference. So then what I did here was without changing the background, I think somebody was asking me about that.

1:06:28Keep/change prompt trick for Nano Banana

Play from 1:06:34 8:88:88 1:06:34 They're like, were you doing that? Do you need to do that? And I wasn't, I couldn't remember offhand, but you can see I didn't put that here, even with the image reference, put it in an entirely different set. But yeah, go ahead. Does it say simple prompt that I've been using a lot for it? Keep change. So like keep character environment change this sometimes that's like it makes it a little bit easier to understand.

Play from 1:07:00 8:88:88 1:07:00 Sorry, O'Rourke. No, just noticed the quality, the one with the bicycle and stuff. The quality looks really nice and realistic. And you started with me journey image, I should say. Yeah, this one is really, really clean. And the other ones also, the skin and stuff looks nice. This one also, yeah. But you started with me journey image, right? And in me journey, you can't get always this type of realism too much.

1:07:09Pushing realism: Nano Banana vs raw Midjourney

Play from 1:07:26 8:88:88 1:07:26 Sometimes you get, sometimes not. But being here, it provides, I think, more realism than your reference in straight or no. It's got a little grain too. You know, it's good. it's interesting. Yeah, because this is based off this one image. I mean, I pretty much used this starting image for most of what I created besides things like that, you know, like with him leaning on the car or something like that. But that was pretty much it.

Play from 1:07:53 8:88:88 1:07:53 This quality is pretty good. And Rory, to your point of like story, like you could, there could be a story, which is what I was thinking of, like this neighborhood. And I've got like different characters. You could also take this person and this life, right? And now he's at, he went to some gym, right? And like he create this whole life around one guy. yeah, yeah, yeah. You can go deep. can go like super rabbit hole with one character and just like put the guy in like every situation.

Play from 1:08:23 8:88:88 1:08:23 Which I think is sort of the future, right? I feel like that's sort of like the future of where storytelling is gonna go now that it's not limited to, you know, the medium can be whatever now. The medium can be social media. And it's just like, now I'm following Drew's guy. Like he could be, he could have his own, you know, page. And it's just like his life in this world. Like it's just, yeah. you've created a character in a video game and now you're activating his life.

1:08:42New media: character-as-influencer storytelling

Play from 1:08:49 8:88:88 1:08:49 Like, you know, like when you play Madden or something, it's like your player? You could take this guy through his entire life. Yeah, that's why it's crazy. And then you can also have the sporting cast's life go at the same time. this was like to your point. Maybe this guy starts a rap career and you start, you build a page around him like sort of like gaining fame and going through a whole story arc, know? It's wild.

Play from 1:09:14 8:88:88 1:09:14 I think that's like, I honestly feel like that's a new form of media that we're gonna see a lot of. Like a lot of this sort of, like character as an influencer kind of thing and it's all story based, right? Like it's all based on the story. It doesn't even matter what it looks like most of the time. It can look great or it can just be like, is this guy's life interesting enough for me to follow with this girl's life? think they have already played around with GTA characters, if you play around with using GTA characters, for example, some Andrea CJ or something like that, that put him on realistic actions or locations, you can also make viral stuff, I think.

Play from 1:09:58 8:88:88 1:09:58 That's, cause you can do that. heard of this, Rosebud? So this is like a, let me see if I can, am I logged in here? Let me, so this is like a, basically you can create a video game. um And I don't know if I'm logged in on this browser or not.

1:10:20Rosebud & branching narrative experiments

Play from 1:10:23 8:88:88 1:10:23 I hope I am because I'd see if I can maybe. My projects. left to kill here. up here. This was like something I was kind playing around with, but it's like, okay, I took this starting image. I can click this. So right there's my start. Now I'm getting, now I'm creating a new scene for him. Character gets up, turns around, walks to the front door.

Play from 1:10:52 8:88:88 1:10:52 Is it generating these ideas for you? Like character goes inside gets Barbie dolls? Yeah, like, well, no, I came up with that. like, but basically it's creating, it created this scene first. You I told it what I wanted to do. I'm like, okay, have them go inside. Then I can create like these different branches of where this, what this character can do. So it's like, okay, well, let me do this now. And let me have them go inside.

Play from 1:11:20 8:88:88 1:11:20 Just gonna see these dudes playing with Barbie dolls, whatever. But like, Apparently you can create different branches of this right so this could be one branch of the story It's like the multiverse. go into an alley or go get into a car and do something. I don't know. This was kind of like interesting. I've spent a few minutes in here, but like that was kind of dumb because I was like, this is this. This could be crazy.

1:11:46Simulation talk: where storytelling is heading

Play from 1:11:47 8:88:88 1:11:47 This is where it's all going. This is it. Vibe Code games. This is where we enter the simulation. So we're finally building it. It's happening pretty quick. Thank you. um Well, should we wrap up, guys? I think we probably went pretty deep here. Alar, thanks for joining us.

Play from 1:12:12 8:88:88 1:12:12 All the way from Estonia. It's our boy. Go check him out. He's on X. He's on LinkedIn. Always dropping heaters. And Rory, we got the like and subscribe out of way up front, man. I'm feeling pretty good about that. If you missed it, or if you weren't paying attention, you like and subscribe right now. That's what you got to do. If you're still here, come on, you know, and then tell your friends.

Play from 1:12:37 8:88:88 1:12:37 And then I just bumped into my own desk. Tell your friends. Tell your mom. Tell your dog. Tell whatever. We'll be back next week. I think maybe we got a crazy schedule. Crazy couple of weeks. uh We're gonna try to see if we can pin him down for an episode, but we'll see. I've got some flexibility, so we'll see if we can make it happen. ah But yeah, this was great, guys. Thanks for joining us. Episode 50, end of books. Wrap it up, and we'll see you guys in the next one.

1:12:45Wrap-up

Play from 1:13:05 8:88:88 1:13:05 Peace.