Making of "The Basement" horror short (Detailed BTS) (Patreon)

Behind the scenes of making this video. We start with great images which I have prompted in midjourney last year (from part III: into the basement). These are the first two images. I then take the images to luma https://lumalabs.ai/dream-machine and try to animate them.

For the first image I have prompted "a monster is swinging from chains in the dark basement. old horror movie" in Luma. For the second image I prompted "giant skeleton in a basement with chains. light is swaying left and right. horror movie. chains moving. old film". The result of the second one isn't what I asked for but I still used the clip.

I then go to https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/search/ and look up free sound effects to match my clips. I used around 10 different sound effects for this 11 second video. I only added so many because it adds to the realism and immersion. I can usually get away with just a couple sounds.

The speed and duration of the video clips and audio clips get adjusted and the volume of some clips get adjusted as well, again, for realism or for a more immersive experience. The idea of making the light turn off and adding the breathing in the dark just came to my head since I've played a lot of horror games.

I export the media with Premiere Pro, although any video editor would work. I export a reel version as well. The exported size is 864x1168 which is the size of the midjourney images. For reels, we want a 9:16 ratio so the video gets cropped to a canvas size of 657x1168. This will allow the reels to show up full screen (top to bottom) without borders on both instagram and facebook. The reason for having both reels and videos is that reels will reach a huge audience that is not your followers which will then convert some to follow you. It also essentially doubles your monetization if you are on the facebook bonus program.

Besides Luma, I also recommend https://klingai.com which has just launched a free version for global users. It used to be chinese only. These are two of the best image to video generators that are publicly available, with runway gen3 joining them as the top 3. Luma and Kling will be free to try though and if you have many email accounts, you could create several accounts.