Midjourney Prompts #5: Story settings

Where you place your character matters

"Midjourney Prompts" is an article series that covers keywords, phrases, and prompt structure to help you create your next image masterpiece.

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Where is it?

Not many people can immediately think of 100 possible settings (for example, the beach, the office, or the school) to place their character(s) and tell a story. Of course, unless you are an expert novelist or gifted storyteller. Or, ask ChatGPT to do it for you.

The truth is that you will not look for a list of locations when writing a prompt. You will most likely use whatever comes to mind, especially if you already have a specific idea.

For mortals who are too lazy to think (like me), you can use a prompt generator to generate a prompt that includes the location of an event in your story.

When creating an image, where you place your character is important, especially for storytelling. If you rely on ChatGPT or prompt generators, the bots will frequently pick up common settings such as school, garden, and so on unless you specifically request more unusual locations.

Pro Tip: Knowing keywords for settings or locations can help make your images and stories more engaging. This is because settings can create atmosphere and mood (e.g., an uneasy feeling in a cemetery), reinforce a theme or genre (e.g., a horror story), connect story elements, and so on.

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A mega list of story-setting keywords

I've compiled 23 settings categories, or 690 places (30 per category), for you to place your characters in. These keywords should be able to cover a wide range of use cases, but you can always extend, modify, and combine them to create limitless variety of settings.

Prompt template

All of the prompts below follow the same format:

environmental portrait photograph of a character at [somewhere] --ar 16:9 --sref [x] — v 6.1

“Somewhere” could be:

• bomb shelter

• ghost town

• and any of the 690 places

In addition to the default Midjourney style, Style reference (Sref) was used in some cases. The [x] is the placeholder for the Sref code.

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Putting the character in the setting with styles

Midjourney's default style of V6.1 is extremely versatile and excels at depicting the setting that follows the keyword(s). However, it uses random aesthetic styles, which may overpower the effect of the keyword we want to investigate further. The generated images can be so beautiful that we forget our goal, which is to see what happens when we choose a setting and place for our character.

Therefore, seven Sref codes with different aesthetic styles are used to represent the setting keywords. The aesthetic style of each Sref code is fixed so that we pay more attention to the character's surroundings and consider what happens if we use the same setting in another story; will the setting make the story more interesting? Will the setting allow for the creation of subplots in the story?

The disadvantage of Sref codes is that they are stricter than the default Midjourney style. Sometimes, a Sref code struggles to depict the surroundings with a simple prompt. Some tweaking and adjustments to the prompt may be needed to make it work.

The images above all have the same prompt; the only difference is the default Midjourney style for image (1), and the rest are styles from the Sref codes.

environmental portrait photograph of a character --ar 16:9 --sref {1867548821, 1384243818, 4015471372, 3950300649, 3802864202, 4092776256, 2538949348} — v 6.1

1. Default Midjourney style

2. Sref code: 1867548821 (fantasy genre aesthetics)

3. 1384243818 (cartoon style)

4. 4015471372 (3D character)

5. 3950300649 (Sci-fi photographic style)

6. 3802864202 (fantasy illustration)

7. 4092776256 (tribal/ horror/cult photographic style)

8. 2538949348 (Sci-fi photorealistic style)

Tip: Each Sref code generates a "world" in Midjourney Patchwork, preserving the aesthetics of the creations regardless of the story setting.

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Dear Paid Members,

Here's a list of setting keywords and their examples: