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Consistent Cinematography with Midjourney: Cinematic Prompt Cheatsheet
A Guide To Creating Cinematic Images With Midjourney
Cinematic Prompt Anatomy
There are many ways to create images that have a “cinematic” look. Generally, we perceive images as “cinematic” if they contain artifacts of real-world filmmaking, such as certain camera angles and shot types, cinematic scene composition, lighting effects or character placement, etc.
This may sound trivial at first, but this general observation has some interesting implications when it comes to developing “cinematic prompts” with Midjourney. Basically, in order to make our images “cinematic” we want to show as many artifacts of traditional filmmaking as possible.
Here is a schematic drawing showing how a single prompt can contain all the necessary cinematic artifacts and how they relate to the corresponding filmmaking crafts.
- A Prefix or Trigger is used to add context to Midjourney’s holistic prompt interpretations
- A scene description includes (explicitly or implicitly) character placement, action, composition, mise-en-scène/set design, props, etc.
- Style & shot descriptions include (explicitly or implicitly) camera & shot type, lighting, post-production, film material/quality, etc
- By using parameters, aspect ratio, quality, and chaos can be defined.
It’s important to remember that these categories can’t be sharply differentiated, since they semantically overlap. For example, when using the same prompt (i.e. same prefix + same scene description), the usage of the word
- “night” in the scene description implies specific lighting effects (e.g. “Backlighting”),
- replacing it with “having a conversation” implies specific shot types (e.g. “Two Shot”, “Over-the-shoulder shot”), and
- changing it to “futuristic room” implies specific set designs and color grading (“sterile” or “clinical” indoor set design, resemblance to genre reference works, e.g…
