Spent a chunk of last weekend designing a poster for a non-existent movie using AI.

The concept was: "A southern gothic horror film about Johnny Appleseed."

Below is the result... all art assets created & edited with AIs (🧵):

With a general concept developed, it was time to generate the following  assets with @midjourney_ai:
- A moody background image,
- Robert Pattinson as "the solider."
- Anya Taylor-Joy as "the solider's wife."
- Adam Driver as Johnny Appleseed

All AI prompts followed a similar pattern and shared keywords:
"A poster of <subject> <vibe/action>. southern gothic, creepy, cinematic, dramatic lighting. --ar 2:3"

It took around 15-30 prompts per asset to find the right image.

A few samples of background generations:

Adam Driver as Johnny Appleseed...

This one was tricky. Midjourney can't handle "pan on the head" or "holding an apple" very well, so generated a base character and then added the pan + apple using DALL-E 2 "outpainting."

Robert Pattinson as "the solider"...

Note the image landed on didn't include the lower vest. DALL-E 2 "outpainting" to the rescue again.

Finally, Anya Taylor-Joy as "the soldier's wife"...

(Midjourney was trying to add text to these, thus, the unintelligible words.)


After generating the assets, used Photoshop's built-in "Select Subject" (also AI) to cut out the characters and composite them onto the background.

Add some movie poster typography and done.

It all took about 3 hours and cost less than $10.


Honestly found this whole process to be both amazing and a bit troubling.

Amazing because it felt like being an art director of a studio that could produce quality results practically in real-time and basically for free.

Troubling for the same reason.

There's great power but little responsibility in the current iteration of these tools particularly around style attribution, credit, and likeness.

The next few years will be interesting and challenging for artists, to put it mildly.

Using AI for a semi-serious design project

When new technology starts gaining traction but isn't quite ready for mainstream yet, it tends to be both overrated and underrated at the same time.

What we're calling "Web 3" is no different.

I remember when Web 2.0 was emerging, some people were freaking out that this was going to solve *everything* while others were claiming it was all smoke-and-mirrors and would fade.

The irony is that the overly-hyped and the overly-skeptical often have the least accurate understanding of what is actually being built.

One side wants to cash in, the other wants you to get off their lawn, but most are not working on the new technology at all.

The people more quietly building in the middle are the ones to watch if you want to know what the future will look like.

Or better yet, help build it yourself.