Integrating AI in the creative process
With AI developing at breakneck speed, it can feel difficult to keep up, so we decided to speak with some of our favorite creators to find out how they utilize these tools to fuel their content and support their creativity.
Content creator and videographer James Matthews likes to keep on top of technological developments. He’s a UK-based videographer and filmmaker who focuses on giving his audience an emotional experience through his productions.
He’s an early adopter of Artlist’s new AI tools, like AI Voiceover, AI Assistant extension, AI-powered search, and AI image and video generator, and often shares how-to videos and insight on his YouTube Channel.
In this article, we’ll find out how James uses these tools to save time, brainstorm, and fuel his ideas.
Ahead of the curve
James’s creative journey began when he was a kid growing up in Essex. “I was really into graffiti,” he says, chatting from a hotel room in Bali. “I used to do graffiti in my local area, and that turned into a passion for photography.”
He’d spend his weekend at the local skate park BMXing and taking photos of his friends with a DSLR camera he got for his birthday. “Everyone started asking me to take a picture of them, and then I got my first photography job at a nightclub in Essex,” he says. “That was a nightmare. I don’t recommend that.”
From there, he segued into film. “I started to wonder what I could do with 25 frames instead of 1,” he says. The first video job he ever got was a promo video for his friend’s dad’s company, and after that, he slowly built his portfolio as a videographer. “Then I decided to start a YouTube channel at a time when only a few other people were doing it,” he says.
It was 2011, and James became one of the first YouTube vloggers documenting his tips and ideas with how-to videos. “I didn’t have any expectations,” he remembers. “But I just loved doing it, enjoyed sharing, and over time the channel just grew, and I got more jobs from YouTube than my commercial work.”
Slow and steady
From the start, James was always attracted to human creativity, which is why he loves to document stories of creatives. “I appreciate all creativity, whether it’s a music producer, a painter, an artist, or a guitar maker, for example.”
James is known for his slow-paced and steady documentary style. “I really like to allow the project to breathe, and give the audience time to absorb it,” he says.
James was one of the first creators ever to team up with Artlist in 2018, and the collaboration made sense immediately. James’s style of how-to video is friendly, informative, and genuinely useful for filmmakers. He loves to try out new technology and share his perspective and opinion with his followers.
That extends to AI, and James often shares how-to videos of his latest AI discoveries on his YouTube channel, showcasing how he uses new tools to create content. “Even back in 2018, Artlist was quite revolutionary in the YouTube space and online audio space,” James says.
James is a great example of a creator who’s using AI to cut out the more tedious aspects of content creation.
“I use Artlist’s silence removal plug-in with Premiere Pro,” he says. “It cuts out all of the dead sections in interviews with no audio using AI, which is amazing. It saves loads of time, and you can customize it depending on how much time you want in between each silence.”
He sees AI as an assistant, and is keen to understand its capabilities and how it can help productivity.
Should creators use AI?
A lot of the conversation around AI is centered around how it might take over creative work. “I understand the negativity,” James says. “My personal opinion is AI is coming whether you like it or not, so you can either allow AI to crash on you or learn to ride the wave of it.”
James believes that AI can help us actualize our creativity, rather than take it over. “I love being a human, and I don’t want it to take over the purest passions of creativity,” he explains. “But my opinion is, in the creative industry, you have to at least be dabbling in AI tools or you’ll be left behind, and that’s the reality of it.”
Check out this blog post to learn about how you can create videos using AI with Artlist’s tools.
How James uses AI in his content creation
There are lots of ways creators can use AI to boost their creativity, but James says he finds it most useful during pre-production.
“I only use AI one way at the moment, and that is to storyboard,” he says. “When I’m working with a client on a project or idea, I have a very clear vision in my head. As a creative, the most important thing for me is to get that idea onto a screen without it being polluted.”
He does this using Artlist’s AI text-to-video generator tool, typing prompts and then allowing it to create visuals. He’ll then use prompts to tweak it to represent the exact image he had in his head.
“So, for example, I have a brief for a film,” James says. “I have the idea in February, and we start to shoot in June or July because we’ve had to sign off on budgets, ideas, locations, all of that. And by that time, the original idea has been so polluted with all the politics and everything else, that the idea is not even close to what it originally was. So for me, personally, using AI in pre-production is really, really useful.”
Before AI, James used to draw the images in his storyboard, which took days of his time and wasn’t particularly life-like. But now with text-to-image and text-to-video generative AI, his vision is much clearer, which helps build confidence in his client, who can clearly see James’ idea on a screen. “I can literally show them what we’re trying to recreate in real life with cameras, actors, lighting, location, and we can use that as a base to create our content.”
For example, on a recent documentary shoot with Mazda, he wanted to feature a guitar maker whose emotionally driven guitar designs resonated with the brand’s philosophy. James created a pre-production pack using Artlist’s AI tools, incorporating the location, season (autumn in a German winery), and visuals like color schemes and framing ideas. Generative AI helped him show his vision clearly, which gave the client confidence to go ahead with the project.
For more insight into his process, James made a video on generative AI that actually benefits creators.
Generative AI as an assistant, not an artist
Although many creators are using AI to generate art, James currently only uses it within pre-production. “I use AI to assist my ideas,” he says. I want to hold onto pure human creativity. I don’t want AI to take that away, but it can assist me in building my ideas and helping them become a reality on the screen.”
On his YouTube channel, James shares tips and tricks to navigate the new world of AI with tools that genuinely help creators, sharing thoughts on what he plans to use in the future as well as what he currently uses. “I personally haven’t used the voice over just yet in my own work, but I know in the future I will because it’s pretty much perfect,” he says.
And it’s been easy to integrate Artlist’s AI tools because he’s already so familiar with the platform. “I’ve been using Artlist for years, so I know it like the back of my hand,” he says. “Now all their tools are in Premiere Pro, so they seamlessly integrate with the platform, and the transition to AI feels natural and intuitive. It’s just an extension of the Artlist experience.”
AI advice for creators
“My advice would be to try your best to embrace it,” James says. “Because at the end of the day, we’re in a technology-driven industry, so you have to embrace new technology.”
Ultimately, James hopes AI will simply act as a tool to help humans express their art, rather than make art itself. “I hope that AI allows people to express their human creativity and bring that to life, rather than replace it,” he says. “I don’t think it’d be very nice if AI were to completely make human decisions when it comes to creativity, but if it can facilitate them, and help a human actualize their creativity, then that’s all I care about.”
James Matthews is a UK-based videographer and Filmmaker who focuses on giving his audience an emotional experience through his productions. For more tricks, tips, and AI how-tos, follow James Matthews on YouTube.
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