Generating animated featured images for our WordPress blog using MidJourney, RunwayML, and Filmora

GBTI is a developer advocacy group with a focus on developing and reporting on open source and self hosted software applications. We have a growing discord community as well as a github with tutorials and demonstrations.

Most contributors to the GBTI network have full time jobs as well as side projects that they are passionate about, therefore all articles, products, and tutorials produced are produced in spare time. If you have a project you would like us to report on our write about, please consider registering as a community member on the gbti homepage. It’s free and we’re happy to show your project some love.

In this guest publication for HashNode we wanted to briefly showcase some of the recent featured images we’ve produced for our articles.

It has been our goal to make featured image articles that are meaningful, relevant, stimulating, and intriguing leveraging cutting edge #ml tools like MidJourney, RunwayML, as well as video editing tools like Wondershare Filmora.

Our current process goes as follows:

1. Generate a still using MidJourney (we use the --ar 5:3 option)

2. Animate the still using RunwayML

3. Add text and additional animated effects uing Filmora

4. Export the image with the best balance of quality and image size. (500x500 makes a good featured image for our articles)

Current gif size for 4 seconds @ low quality as just under 3mb.

We are sure we can get this down lower with practice and exploration, but for now we just like the novelty factor of Harry Potter style slightly moving images.

Please enjoy the following examples and feel free to open the links to see the impression they give off in full screen mode:

You can follow our work at X/Twitter @gbtilabs and on daily.dev