177 | Building High-Impact Video Awareness Campaigns with AI with Margarida Barreto

0:00Hello, and welcome to another live episode of the Leveraging AI podcast. the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI, to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host. And today, we are going to do some magic together. So even just a year ago, even just six months ago, creating a high-quality video for an awareness campaign, for your brand, for your company, for yourself, or whatever it is you're trying to promote, required multiple people with a wide variety of expertise from video to audio to filming to editing to scripting to research, all these kind of things.

0:38And it cost a lot of money and took weeks and sometimes months to produce. But today we are going to show you how one person in less than one hour can do this whole thing. And I'm not talking about winging it. We're like, okay, let's create a quick video and it will be cute. But I'm actually talking about the A to Z process without skipping any step from ideation, research, compiling ideas from different sources, scripting the video, creating images, and B-roll, recording the voice and the voiceover for the characters, creating the video itself, editing the video, all of that can be done with a variety of AI tools.

1:16And you can do it on your own without any technical skills. Obviously, having technical skills or having knowledge in this topic helps, which is where this particular episode becomes even more exciting. So let me tell you a little bit about our guest today. So Margarita Barreto has been in the creative side of marketing for years. She held almost any position you can imagine from graphic designer, art director, creative director. And in addition, she's done this both in companies and on agencies. So she's seen this from every direction possible. She's also an entrepreneur and a partner in a successful marketing and branding agency.

1:51So she knows this thing inside and out. And in addition, She's an AI expert who has learned how to apply AI tools for everything that she's doing. So she's bringing together real deep knowledge in marketing and branding and video production together with her AI skills, which makes her the perfect person to introduce this topic to us. Now, I'm telling you right now, this is going to be high pace with high value session. So buckle up and get ready to learn a lot in this session. I am personally really, really excited about this. And because I'm myself passionate about this and we produce a lot of videos.

2:26So I'm really excited to welcome Margarita to the show. Margarita, welcome to Leveraging AI. In the next few years, AI technology will change our world dramatically. Whether you are a business executive trying to catapult your business forward or just somebody who refuses to be left behind and want to advance your career, this is the show for you. I'm your host Isar Maitis, a serial entrepreneur and an AI enthusiast. You'll hear invaluable practical tips from innovative business leaders, AI practitioners, and some of the brightest AI minds in our world today on how you can leverage AI in ethical ways to advance your career and grow your business.

3:14hi hello thank you for having me it's a pleasure talking a little bit about me and also like Isar said I've been working in design and storytelling for over 20 years in the last three years I fully embraced the creative potential of Gen.ai because I saw a huge opportunity and more than just creating visuals that truly moves me, what truly moves me is using these tools to promote critical thinking, raising awareness and giving a voice to causes that matter. So my hybrid series, the one I will be showing here today, is one of those projects. These are not just aesthetically striking characters, they're a form of visual activism.

4:03Because I think we live in a time where biodiversity is collapsing, species are disappearing silently, and often without a face or a name. So with my hybrids, I try to give them the both of the things, like anthropomorphizing dangerous animals. I want to generate empathy. I want people to stop scrolling on their feeds and start to feel something, to also reflect on the things they are seeing and be more aware. I think because when we turn these kind of things into someone rather than just something, we open the door to conversations and sometimes people learn more things about it. So today I will be showing you how I create some of these images using Me Journey.

4:55You can have the help of any LLM like chat GPT to help you develop your own prompts and now I also animate them using Edra combining the visuals voiceovers and now with a major update on Edra we can also have subtle emotions to give life to each character and I will be showcasing the tools and workflows that I really hope it can inspire you all. Because in the end of the day, I think the use of AI is to connect. We should use AI to care. Use it not just to produce more, but to mean more. So yeah, I'll start. I think being able to use your skills and your capabilities beyond work to do good in the world is absolutely fantastic.

5:45And I'm really glad that's the example that we're going to be using today. For those of you who are joining us live, so first of all, thank you so much. There's I see already a bunch of people on the Zoom and roughly the same amount of people on LinkedIn Live. So if you're there, go introduce yourself. Say where you're from, what are you trying to get from this session, what are you doing with AI today, so we kind of know, and I'll be monitoring the chat and see over there. If you have any questions, absolutely write them in the chat, like I said, either on LinkedIn or on the Zoom call. If you're not there and you're listening to this after the fact, whatever we're sharing on the screen, we will explain everything that we're seeing.

6:17So if you're just driving your car and you want to follow, you'll be able to do that. There's also going to be a link in the show notes to go to the YouTube channel. So if you want to watch it afterwards when you're done driving, you can do that as well. And also, if you're not on the live show, why aren't you not on the live show? We do this every single Thursday with amazing people like Margarita. And then you can come and join us and be able to be interactive and learn and ask questions and engage with other people in the chat. So all these things are a benefit of joining us live. I will say one last thing before we let Margarita take this and run us through her process.

6:49We just opened the registration for our spring cohort of the AI Business Transformation course. So we do these courses all the time. I actually have two courses in April, but these are mostly private courses. And we open courses to the public about once a quarter. Our January session was a huge success. We actually had people from India, the Emirates, Ireland, the Netherlands, South Africa, lots of places in the U.S. and even Hawaii. In previous courses, we had people all the way as far as New Zealand and Australia. So this course literally changes trajectories of people's work around. It changes the trajectory of companies.

7:28And it's really a transformative course. We've been teaching for two years since April of 2023. And hundreds or maybe even thousands of business leaders have taken the course. And the course is four sessions of two hours every Monday at noon Eastern. and in four weeks, you're going to completely change everything you know about AI from concepts to strategy to tools and systems and processes, things like Margarita is going to teach us right now, but across multiple aspects of the business. And you're going to leave in the end with a plan, with an actual checklist on how to implement AI successfully company-wide.

8:04We have people, solopreneur join this course, and we have people who are C-suite in Fortune 500 companies and publicly traded companies on NASDAQ and everything in between. So if you are looking for a way to accelerate your understanding of how to implement AI successful in your business, don't miss this opportunity. There's going to be a link in the show notes to go and find the course. And if you use the promo code leveraging AI 100, you will get a hundred dollars off for being a listener of this podcast. That's it on the course. Again, thanks everybody for joining us live. Margarita, the stage is yours.

8:36Show us your magic, how we can create amazing videos using AI tools. Okay, thank you. Let's go. Let's start by sharing my screen. Let me know if you are seeing it. Yep. Great. So I'm going to start by showing the end results. The first and some of the campaigns that I've done to create awareness about the things I was telling you before. Pollution has turned my rivers into toxic sludge pools. Not exactly the spa day I was hoping for. We snakes like to keep things clean and slithery. Can you help us clean up this mess before I have to start wearing a hazmat suit? So I want to pause you just for one second, for those of you who are just listening to this thing.

9:20So you were listening to a voice of a person speaking, but on screen, we're seeing a mesh, if you want, between a woman and a snake. And it looks stunning. Like the visual aspect of this is incredible. It literally looks like a woman half turned into a snake speaking in a natural voice with her lips moving and everything, delivering her message. And so, again, if you're driving, keep listening. We're going to explain everything we're seeing. But it's worth afterwards at least clicking on some of these examples. Yeah. Next, I'm going to show another species. It's in danger because it's a victim of abuse, like in the cosmetic areas.

9:59I'm Gigi. Our burros used to be safe, but now they're being destroyed by urban expansion. Many of us have lost our families and homes. We need green spaces to thrive. Let's work together to protect them. Amazing. All the videos end with like the caption to make a difference, visit a trustful organization where you can also learn what you can do to help this, to help and change and make a difference in the animals' lives. So this one. Hello, I'm Grace. My towering home in the forest is disappearing. Cut down for timber and farmland. We've lost so much of our beautiful canopy. It's getting harder to find food and shelter.

10:36Please help us save our forests before they're all gone. They are all very short and simple. Climate change is messing with my flower fashion show. It's hard to find the perfect petals when everything's wilting. Help us protect our delicate blooms so we can keep fluttering fabulously. So again, those of you not watching this, we saw a woman that is, again, a cross between a woman and a giraffe and now a butterfly. And they all really are amazing from a visual perspective, but they have a human face and they're actually speaking naturally, even though they're a cross between an animal and a person.

11:11Very cool. And now the panda one. It's the last one before we go into the demo. Greetings. I'm a panda hybrid called Ali. My bamboo buffet is running out. And trust me, it's not easy finding good takeout in the forest these days. We pandas need our all-you-can-eat bamboo feasts. Help us save our bamboo before we have to start a panda food delivery service. I love the little humor in it. I love like literally everything about these videos. And again, I think on the broader scale, the beauty of this, whatever you're selling, whether it's an important idea like this or something in business, the ability to make it funny, the ability to touch the emotional side of people and get them to emotionally connect is amazing.

11:51And I'm very curious to see the process on how you created those. And I'm sure so is everybody else on the chat. Yeah, I think the trick is always there because we are talking about serious things. But if you just speak about the bad thing, sometimes people just, OK, this is too much to say. I don't want to see it anymore. When you are creating campaigns with this kind of message, I think if you input there some irony or some humor, It can have more engagement to the audience. So I think that's something for any creator to keep in mind because it can really make a difference. So how do I start all of this?

12:33I use a lot of Gen.AI tools. One of the ones that I like the most is Me Journey. I use it daily. It's here where I created my first hybrids. You have a lot of different ways to create the prompts to generate the images you saw. These ones I've done yesterday just to show here, but I have here my search of the ones that I've done all over the years. So you can see these ones are for last year. They are very different. I also have my plants, my hybrid plants. and the way you can play and tweak the prompts also makes a difference. And I don't know if everyone in the audience is aware or knows how to work with Me Journey.

13:25It has changed all over the years with the model versions. Most of the people try to use the latest version because it's the more compelling. It has the best results in terms of aesthetic. But because I'm using Me Journey since almost the beginning, I've been playing with some of the versions. And for this case, for my hybrids, what I tend to see is using older versions of the model with my prompts, we get a better result. Here, I think I'll have this one with more aquatic examples, the bunnies you saw there, the snakes. So let me show you how I usually start to do this kind of images. So I'll go here.

14:18Sometimes I use a lot of ShadGPT to help me. In this case, I already asked him to give me a list of exotic animals. From here, I have a different animal that I want to explore. I like to have true information about the things I'm talking about. And I also do my own research. So I'm going to ask him to provide me a list of the most endangered, vulnerable and critical animal species worldwide. Also ask him to give me the numbers of the animals that are still in the wild or in captivity and also to provide me the real data sources. So this will help me to understand a little more about the work I'm doing.

15:02in the end when I'm going to post it on LinkedIn or on Instagram, in any social media, to have more information and reliable information about the things I'm going to talk to others. While this is coming up, a few things to add. First of all, I think your process is fantastic, right? You start with proper research. Now, the only thing I will add is these days there's deep research on most of these tools. So whether using Chatty PP or Claude or Gemini or Grok, whichever one you want to use, they now have deep research capabilities, which will give you even a better research. And again, broadening what Margarita is showing, you can use this for product research, market research, niche research, competitive research, whatever research you want to do for your project, which could be something like this, or it could be a business project.

15:48You can do a lot of research with each and every one of these tools today that will give you a huge amount of information, go through hundreds of websites, and we'll summarize it to you into a quick and easy to digest report. That could be your starting point for your video and for your campaign. Exactly. So after this, I got a bunch of information. In my case, I already know the ones that I want to have the image for. So now that I absorb the information, I am more aware of the content of the things that I want to work on. I'm going to ask for it to give me detailed me journey prompts to create this kind of high, highly realistic hybrid portraits of humans.

16:34And in this case, felons, because I want to work with leopards, lioness, or maybe the giraffe. Let's see how Chachipiti can help me. Again, I don't use ChatGPT to create my own prompts, but I think this can be a huge starting point for anyone to learn some of the key words or even phrases that you can later on on MeJourney tweak and put in your own words. So let's see what it gets to us. While we're waiting for this, again, for everybody who do not know, ChatGPT themselves just came out with an incredible image generator that was not available until two days ago as the recording of this episode that does a really good job in creating images, in mashing images together, in replicating existing images, in editing existing.

17:31It just does really amazing, including high quality text, which is very problematic on many of the platforms, including Me Journey. So I know, Margarita, right now your process is in Me Journey, and I love Me Journey as well. But just so everybody knows, again, Gemini came out with a very powerful capability a few weeks ago, and now they've added additional capability in their experimental world on Google AI Studio that you can do more stuff with. So you have lots of options as far as how you can create these kind of images, including in Chachupiti itself, potential. Yeah, true. If we have time, I'm going to try to use one of the images here on ChatGPT just to show what it can do.

18:10Yeah, so let's see. Now ChatGPD gave me some prompts and he also adds things like aspect ratio. If you want to do things more horizontally or vertically, he also tells you that you can enhance the quality of the images and which version you should use to get more or less realism. So let's go to Me Journey. And I'm going here to my settings. I'm going to see if everything is okay with the things I want. I'm going to put the style raw active. I use this because it tends to ignore the automatically stylization that Me Journey owns itself. So I don't want him to use that. So I'm going to use the style raw as it says.

19:05It's more raw and it can interpret better what you're writing. And I'm going to input one of my prompts. Before you render it, let's read the prompt aloud so people understand. Yeah. So it's a ultra realistic portrait of a human snow leopard hybrid pale skin blending seamlessly with soft white fur covered in snow leopard black rosettes, piercing icy blue eyes, fell in nose and ears, elegant posture, studio black background, cinematic lightening, fashion editorial style, dramatic contrast, hyper detailed textures, 85 millimeters lens photography, soft focus on the edges. I want to pause for a second just to explain to people something very important about prompting for mid-journey versus prompting the way we used to prompt for chat GPT.

20:03A few things. You can see, first of all, it's very descriptive. You don't write sentences. You write facts and things that you want in the image. So you don't say, please create an image of a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You literally just state the things you want in the image. But the more descriptive you are, the more adjectives you use, the more information you give it, such as the camera, the lens, the lighting, the background, the soft edges, all the things that are more the way a photographer would think on framing an image will give you a better output with what you're doing. So these are like the main difference between prompting in like a large language model versus prompting a hardcore image generator like Me Journey in this particular case.

20:48Exactly. And there are a few tricks to see how Me Journey interprets the prompt and what are the words he uses to create. So let's see here. So the prompt I give it to, we see the results. Me Journey always creates you four image per prompt. So you can see the results, but these are more like what I want because I don't want an animal dressed with human clothes. I want an animal that has a human body. So I'm going to test another one. And then I'm going to tell what this new prompt is. Hyper-realistic portraits of a human leopard hybrid, golden yellow fur, with rich dark rosette spots, intense amber eyes, feline facial structure, slick and powerful body, dramatic low-key lightning dark background fashion photography aesthetic high contrast intricate fur detail editorial mood and Rembrandt lightning let's hit enter submit for those of you like oh my god how can I think of a prompt like that the way you do this is you copy somebody else's as a template and then you drop it into a chat GPT and then you ask it for what you want in the image and it will come up with all those details for you in the beginning until you learn and you can figure it out on your own.

22:19It's refresh on the page and you can see the difference of the things. Now I'm going to use the prompts that I asked before to chat GPT. I'm going to copy we use the let's see the lioness. Let's copy the prompt he gave me a few minutes ago and now let's tried it. So we're literally just asked Chachi Petit to give us a prompt in step one after the research where it has the context of what is it that we're trying to do. And now we're literally just copying and pasting. It's not something that Margarita is writing. It's literally the prompt as it came from Chachi Petit. I think this one will give us a more fashion look because I'm seeing here like bold gold jewelry, elegant silhouettes.

23:02So I think we're going wild and crazy here, but Let's hit the result. This will be the last one we'll try, and we'll go choose one of the images I already pre-choose to continue our demo. By the way, for those of you who are not using Me Journey, it has a fast rendering mode, which is what we're using right now, which you get X number a day. If you're not going crazy, you'll do most of your renderings in the fast mode, which actually happens really fast. Yeah, I didn't get wrong the interpretation of the prompt because I told we were going to have a more fashionable and the animal, it's not here.

23:43So I think it's also important to see that even when ChatGPT looks like he's giving you the right things, you have to know how to interpret it and tweak the prompt. So I'm going to pick one of the oldest that I used. And you can see that the prompt is very much simpler. I'm going to click here, use the text. And the prompt is a portrait of an anthropomorphic lioness. And the word anthropomorphic makes all the difference in this kind of prompts. with a human body wearing casual, looking straight ahead at the camera against a gray background in the style of, and you can use it or not. I think for those who are not aware of Me Journey is every time you use, like in any other tool, you use a prompt, the results are never the same.

24:38So you can use and reuse the same prompts and you will always get different outcomes. So let's submit again. Let's see the difference between the one we had previously and the one we have. Because I already have the images that I really want. Let's see here in organized. The ones that I prefer and that I look and see that for a kind of animation, they will work better. in my point of view. I think it will be this one because she's looking straight to the camera. We have a good definition of the character with the background. So I think this is a winner to keep. So I'm going to keep it in my folder.

25:26And this one, I also liked it a lot. I think in terms of animation, it can work. It's always a question if it will really work or not. It's the randomness of working with AI, the unknown of that result. I think anyone who tells you that you can have absolute control, we are not there yet, but we're coming closer. So the thing I do next is that I want to create a voiceover for my image. I want to create a message, like a script for my hybrid to be talking. So what I do is I go again to my me journey, to my Chachipiti, sorry, and I ask him to give me a script for this kind of hybrid. I try to explain to give him more context of the thing so he can understand what I'm talking about and what I really want and the kind of feeling that I want the script to transmit.

26:35I can tell you, for those who are not watching, I'm asking him to create a short voiceover script for a fictional hybrid character, part human, part animal. design using AI. The script should be poetic, mysterious, and emotionally engaging, like a reflection or monologue. I ask him to give me a tone of voice, and I want it to be a short script under 50 words. And in this case, I want him to reach out to Margarita Barreto to learn more, or now it's your turn to create. So I have here three scripts, as I asked. Let's use the first one. So I pick up this script and then I go to one of my favorite tools to create voiceovers, that is 11labs.

27:27So we get to 11labs. I jump to go to app over here, text to speech. We put here our text. I like the voice of Laura, so I think I'm going with it. But you can choose a bunch of other voices and characters. But let's go with Laura. Our distrust is very expensive. I think I like the tone of voice. So let's generate speech. So for those of you, again, just to recap the process until we wait for this to render. We started with research on chat GPT on the topic. We continued to ask ChatGPT to help us write prompts from Me Journey. We created the images of the characters in Me Journey. We then went back to the same chat in ChatGPT because it keeps the context of what we were doing before and asked it to help us write a script for that character that it helped us describe how it looks.

28:20So again, it has the vision of all of that in its memory. And now we go to 11 Labs, which is an incredible tool to create voiceovers. You can replicate your own voice. You can use one of their voices. for each voice, you can control 20 different parameters on how the voice will be, how fast, how slow, what pitch, what emotion you want it to have and stuff like that. So you have a lot of control on how this will come out. You just paste your text or you can just type your text if you want to, and then it will create a voice, which we can already listen to, I think. It's already generated the voice.

28:53And now what we are going to do is going to where the other magic is done. So we're going to jump to Edra. They now launched the Edra Character 3 that in terms of giving emotion to facial expression, it's fantastic. But even before this Character 3 was launched, in terms of facial expressions, I think it was one of the best tools to create avatars with input images. so going to edra and the good thing is as you've seen with 11 labs you can use it for free with the credits i think they have free credits for a month i believe it's 400 credits for free per month when you log in you can create a free account you log in here and you can across this screen Here you can choose what kind of model you want to use.

29:58And fortunately, because of a high demand of users using Adra Character 3, now it's only available for someone who has an account, a subscription. But I think they will soon go back to the, also to give it to the ones who don't have an account, a subscription. So I'm using Adra Character 3 here. I choose it. I want my video to be square and I'm going to upload my image frame. So I'm going to click here. I already have here my images. Let's try with this one. And I'm going to upload the audio that I already have from Eleven Labs, the one we produced previously. I'm going to click here and add to the video.