Avatar The Way of Water Trailer generated by MidJourney

We are witnessing an incredible evolution of text-to-image systems such as Stable Diffusion and MidJourney. Many of them are becoming easily accessible to everyone, through apps, Discord channels, sites or even through the same source code used by developers. The imagination of thousands of people has exploded by using them to generate the most diverse things and give rise to a universe of spectacular digital creations. In parallel with all this, Avatar, “The way of water”, James Cameron’s masterpiece, one of the most eagerly awaited films ever and the second film in one of the most successful sagas of all time, is being released in cinemas. Key to this success is the wonderful setting of Pandora, a planet rich in plants, colours and majestic and incredible creatures. Right from the first teaser trailer, it was clear how this second chapter would be able to catapult viewers back into this breathtaking world. During these Christmas holidays, Lucia Pifferi and I asked ourselves: “What would Pandora look like imagined by MidJourney?” and again: “Is it possible to create an alternative version of the teaser trailer for Avatar The Way of Water using MidJourney?”, “Can these systems be used to create trailer concepts from simple text descriptions?”.

To answer all these questions, we described verbatim the main scenes of the official teaser trailer of Avatar: The Way of Water, and gave them as input, one by one, to MidJourney.

All the images generated were combined to generate a teaser trailer in the same style as the original one. The video can be found at the bottom of the article.

Below are the individual scenes regenerated by MidJourney. For each one we specify a (minimized) caption that we used during generation and the original image taken from the trailer.

Some young blue-skin indigenous run across an aerial vine bridge made by mangrove trees above cloud-covered floating mountains.

Sunlight filters through branches in the forest streaking the blue face dusted with luminous freckles of a young humanoid female indigenous with blue skin, long brown hairs and yellow big eyes. She is feline-like.

Dragon-like creatures fly in the sky above a crystal clear sea. Sunlight breaks on the azure water.

A blue-skin native indigenous with long brown hair riding a winged dragon-like creature leads a flight towards a vast routed shoreline of mangrove trees in front of the sea.

A blue-skinned indigenous female blows a white seashell horn, standing on a mangrove tree in front of the sea on the top of a village.

The light passing through the water illuminates the blue body of a young native girl swimming underwater among corals and multi-vent fish.

At a vast industrial site with a lot of military machinery, two tall soldiers with blue faces and long hair, wearing military uniforms, walk alongside humans.

A large helicopter takes off from a military base with many buildings, structures and vehicles in the background.

One young blue-skinned indigenous boy, one blue-skinned young girl with long hair, and a young indigenous white-skinned boy, creep through the jungle.

Two tall blue-skinned soldiers with military uniforms armed with machine guns roam the jungle.

One angry indigenous boy armed with a bow and arrow in the jungle.

A blue-skinned girl with long hair rides on the back of a slender-necked dolphin-like creature under the sea with the sunlight passing through the water.

Indigenous with blue skin in a forest-like setting.

A young native blue-skinned guy with blue skin and long rasta hairs, swimming underwater with a huge whale-like creature.

In the forest near a lake, dozens of blue-skin indigenous with minimal tribal clothes and blue skin and feline-like faces, holding fire torches in their hands and looking in the same direction.

Standing on a rock in the sea, a tall blue-skinned indigenous sad man with a feline-like face and long hair hugs another blue-skinned indigenous boy with a feline-like face, long hair and blue body, and a young boy with minimal primitive clothes and white skin and long blonde rasta-like hair.

Dozens of blue indigenous, wait on the water of the sea, armed with spears riding some dolphin-like creature.

Armed with a gun, a blue indigenous soldier takes to the air from the sea on a flying fish with crocodilian jaws.

Inside a cavern with minimal light. A female blue indigenous with wide golden eyes looks into the eyes of a male blue indigenous.

Black background with blue smoke coming from below. In the centre, the blue inscription AVATAR.

After generating all the images, we combined them to create the teaser trailer, and here is the result!

The generated images conceptually mirror quite well what happens in the original trailer although with details and contexts are not necessarily identical. Some interesting biases can be noted such as the tendency to use dark complexions for natives or the difficulty in generating unconventional vehicles such as a helicopter with two external propellers. Particularly complex situations also challenge MidJourney, for example, the case of the indigenous woman playing the conch in front of a herd of flying Ikran dragons. It seems not to be particularly capable of detailing many disparate subjects in the same scene, always tending to focus on one of them and putting the others in the background by depicting them in a more cursory manner. It works best, however, when dealing with similar subjects such as many people or many dragons.
These systems are constantly evolving and researchers are working hard to improve them day by day. Today, we have shown how through MidJourney and similar systems it is possible to create video trailer concepts that, although not obviously up to the standards of the work of professionals, can give an idea of what the film could be. The potential of text-to-image systems is now there for all to see and the possible applications are endless. Content creators of all levels will be able to make real use of them and the entire industry is about to be radically revolutionized.

We will see some good ones!