1: Dancing Into the Light Fantastic
‘Get down!’ Dad yelled and hurled Jason and Miranda to the floor.
Jason tucked into a roll and ended in a crouch, flattening himself against a concrete pillar. Mum and Dad darted behind parked cars as a blacked-out van squealed to a halt and three men in long leather coats burst out — each gripping a short machine gun.
Those are the opening lines of Jason Willow: Face Your Demons, the first book in my paranormal action trilogy.
I’ve created the paperback, e-book and audiobook so what, I thought, if I made the movie next? Could I learn to translate the complex characters, building tension and frantic action onto the small screen?
Enter Creatorwood, an AI video platform that promises to transform written scenes into cinematic sequences. Upload a chapter or an entire book and it generates digital characters, props and locations, divides the text into scenes shots, dialogue and actions and produces an opening frame for each one. Make whatever changes you like and then tell it to shoot the scene.
So I uploaded my first chapter. Within minutes, I had my cast and locations and my novel morphed into a storyboard complete with camera angles, lighting choices and sound effects.
I edited everything I wanted to and then hit “generate video”.
Here’s my first two versions of Scene 1, Shot 1:
To recap the scene: the Willow family are trapped in a dingy multi-storey car park late at night. Dying fluorescent lights flicker overhead. A black van screeches into view and accelerates towards them…
Human posture, it turns out, requires very precise instruction. If you tell a father to “pivot towards the van,” you may discover that there’s a bit of dancing involved.
If you forget to specify that crouching characters should remain crouching, they improvise.
There is clearly a craft to this — a new kind of prompt choreography where every movement, eye-line and shift of weight must be carefully described.
And yet, even on this first attempt, some things worked well. I got the characters and voices I wanted. The menace of the car park deepened. With work, I might be able to translate the exciting opening of Jason Willow to the screen as a trailer or hook or even the opening to an entire movie.
I’m not a filmmaker — but storytelling is storytelling. Exploring how AI interprets narrative structure has already made me think differently about pacing, staging and visual tension.
Creatorwood also generates a movie poster for you which you can edit as much as you like and update with changed/new characters.
I’m going to keep going and you can come on the cinematic journey with me.
If you’d like to see which of the Willow family escape that car park and why the van is there in the first place, you can dive straight into the paperback, ebook or audiobook editions here: [links].
Or maybe you will see it right here, on screen, in my next blog.
