“I did this global casting without leaving my desk”

AI FILM Prompted by MICHELLE CASSIS.

No flights. No casting rooms. No cameras. No small talk about the weather.

Just me, my imagination, my laptop, and way too much coffee.

Confession time: I’ll admit it, I was skeptical. AI can pull off crazy explosions, aliens fighting crocodiles, even Moses on a surfboard. But real intimacy? As a director, my personal cinematic approach is human, intimate, real. I never thought I could get close with AI. But I decided to embrace it and give it a try, *my way*.

This is my first attempt. 100% AI generated.

Big shoutout to Rourke Sefton-Minns, PJ Accetturo, and Simon Meyer. Thanks for sharing your experience and advice!

And now, the ingredients. Here’s how I did it

First, I wrote prompts for my characters.

I wanted them, messy, imperfect, real but also to see them in an intimate way. I obsessed over the camera placement and the character’s posture, looking over every detail, generating 100–200 images on Freepik using Google DeepMind’s Nano Banana Model. Then I upscaled the selected ones with Enhancor.ai for skin texture, and then I personally tweaked some crucial details in Adobe Photoshop.

Animated them with ByteDance Seedance 1.0 Pro (through Freepik). Shot size, camera placement, camera movements and actions are the key to the prompts to achieve the cinematic yet realistic look.

Edited everything in Adobe Premiere Pro to a soundtrack I created with Suno AI.

As I worked on this, I noticed many people dismiss AI as useful only for stock-style, generic images. And I get why... Because no matter how good this tool is, you still need a vision behind the prompts. AI can generate incredible images, but it takes storytellers to shape them into something meaningful.

I’m sure some of you will spot little flaws here and there, and that’s okay. In the end, I realize it’s less about making it perfect and more about making it *personal*.

And now I’m excited to take this further, to explore new ways of telling stories, and push the boundaries of what I can create with AI. The journey is just beginning, so stay tuned for more!

Now I’m curious:

Which character’s your favorite? Do any look suspiciously familiar?

And if you want to know more about the prompts, DM me. I’m happy to share!

— Mich