Alex Patrascu is a filmmaker living in Bucharest, Romania. With a long history of working in the creative industries, he’s dived head first into the world of generative AI, using Leonardo to develop a feature length film.
Leonardo: Can you tell us about your background in film and video?
Alex: I’ve worked in the creative world for over 25 years as a graphic designer, product designer, illustrator and creative director. I grew up in Romania and I was always fascinated by the world of Hollywood. Watching everything, from ‘Back to the Future’ to Tarantino.
Meanwhile, the rapid evolution of technology always fascinated me. A friend handed me a copy of Photoshop back in 1998 and I was hooked. I was doing animations of all kinds, in Flash, 3D Studio Max and eventually Premiere Pro and Final Cut.
Leonardo: How did you get started using Leonardo.Ai?
Alex: When I first heard about GPT and OpenAI I realized everything will change. Leonardo.Ai came into my radar around June 2023. I was trying to create some client work in a very specific style using Midjourney and Stable Diffusion and after a couple of weeks of failing I decided to give Leonardo a try.
I trained some custom models and they were a hit! The client was very happy and we could actually complete our project. With the release of VisionXL and DiffusionXL it became by far my number one choice for generative AI. Since then, I’ve pretty much dropped every other AI tool and focused only on Leonardo.
How are you currently using Leonardo in your filmmaking process?
Alex: I use Leonardo.Ai as an exploratory tool, a visual reference and a starting point for my videos, creating thousands of images and videos a day. When I find something I like, I dive deeper into it and eventually at the end of the day if there’s something that I still love I will probably turn it into a small film, a trailer or the basis for a client project. Leonardo is the first tab I open each day when I start working. It’s the most essential app in my creative workflow.
How has Leonardo.Ai unlocked your creativity?
Alex: Leonardo.Ai made me faster and more organized. The interface is sublime on a vertical monitor. I can see so many creations all at once and decide very fast where I should focus my attention.
Next up, I want to make a big custom library of poses to take my movies to the next level as well as play around with Image Guidance to create consistent characters and styles. I plan to use Leonardo as the starting point for my first full-length fully AI generated movie, coming later in 2024. The future looks amazing and I can’t wait to get all these workflows in place with Leonardo.
What are you most excited about in terms of the future of creativity?
Alex: Absolutely everything. I feel like AI enables us to do some amazing things. We are seeing some incredible implementations, like real-time AI rendering in canvas, extremely realistic AI video, custom GPTs to assist everyone in their daily lives, and who knows what amazing tools will be there in the future. We’re still in the very early stages of generative AI and I think in one year from now we’ll look back and be amused at the tools we were using.
🧊 ICEBREAKERS
— Max (@maxescu) January 24, 2024
The world is experiencing a disturbance of elemental nature. Find out why.
Enjoy ✌️ pic.twitter.com/3gmsklNDme
You can track Alex’s journey to create the first AI generated film on Youtube and Twitter (X).