All of these started from a Midjourney image that was created using the following prompt:
• circa 2500s Astropunk space ogre sitting in the dark, Vincent Di Fate influence. He puffs on a large lit cigar with plumes of smoke emanating from the burning stogie. The burning cigar provides all the light. Image fades to black on edges. Tiny light leaks hit the Ogre. Matte painting –ar 3:2 –no words –s 250
The first tool used was a combination of Adobe Photoshop – where I ‘lit the cigar’ and ‘color cast red light on his face.’ This is cycled twice in Premiere to fade in and out. I also laid in a piece of looped smoke video (created in Midjourney + Gen II) that I overlayed, masked and placed on top of the cigar for effect.
Next segment was PikaLabs (on Discord). I dropped in the image and just let it do it’s thing.
Third segment was an 8-sec render in Runway ML Gen II of the space ogre who looks a bit miffed about something.
The final segment was from LeiaPix Converter – which simply creates a little bit of motion by leveraging the depthmap of the image and moving the camera in relation to the patterns you choose.
Music segment from EpidemicSound.
There are other tools – just a few to start your morning with.