By far, the most helpful two features I’ve learned while using MidJourney are the parameters for image weight and the ability to blend images together. Having a basic understanding of syntax construction became important as I started using more camera angels to manipulate perspective, but being able to apply weights to particular tokens has been a game changer.
Using the /shorten command helps to see what words MidJourney is ignoring, but sometimes there’s no getting around what it considers to be the primary subject. I had this problem as I tried to get a prompt of “cinematic shot, fierce storm clouds, barn on fire –ar 4:3”. It’s not a very long prompt and yet, I could not get the barn to be on fire.
The clouds were very red, very ominous, but even after I tried tightening up my prompt by switching “barn on fire” to “burning barn” and wrapping the latter in quotes to try to force MidJourney to interpret the phrase as a single token, the best I got was more lightening.
MidJourney: “You want fire? Got it. Here’s more sky fire.” I changed tactics and added some image weights to my tokens. Barn. I want the barn to be the focus of the fire, not the sky.
Prompt: cinematic wide angle, fierce storm clouds::0.2, “burning barn”::0.8 –ar 4:3
We’re getting closer. Something is burning. Is it the barn? Unclear. It might just be one of those piles of junk that inevitably collects alongside the barn because you don’t have space inside the barn due to all the other stuff inside the barn or because that’s where you keep actual animals. (Yes, I grew up with barns.)
As I continued to come up short on producing a barn on fire, I began to wonder if it was the subject. Was a burning barn considered “visually shocking or disturbing” by MidJourney and blocked because it was against their community guidelines? It seemed like a bit of a stretch, but the alternative was that MidJourney didn’t have a reference for what a burning barn looked like. I was skeptical of that too, but I decided to try my work around.
I uploaded a close-up image I had of a burning barn, sans storm clouds, and then copied both the URL for that image and the URL for the MidJourney image with the fire adjacent into the prompt I’d been using. It got me fire surrounding the barn and a few live embers on the roof. I upped the stylization to 900. Now I had a barn that was actually on fire.
The only problem was that I had lost my fierce storm clouds due to smoke. But that was an easy fix. I zoomed out. Storm clouds back in frame. However, due to the extra landscape space available, MidJourney offered me an additional 1-3 burning dwellings (a couple houses and even a castle.) Clearly, I liked buildings on fire, yes? It was a little too much, so I selected the image with the fewest extra details and switched to Vary (Region.) Using inpainting, I removed the ‘bonus’ shed and finally got myself back to a single object of focus with some cinematic storm clouds.
