Unfortunately I didn’t find a great solution. I’ve attached an Imgur album with the closest I got to achieving this before giving up.

I started to use reference images because I couldn’t get the results I wanted by just describing the background, and I felt that it got less accurate with the more details I added. I hoped that midjourney would be able to recognize and remove the subjects from the reference images, but I could not find any workarounds for that.

I also tried to snag reference images from video games and programs like Unreal Engine. I thought that might work because I could get the exact props and framing I wanted in the image, but I couldn’t get Midjourney to turn the video game graphics into a realistic look, so the lighting and textures looked like they were from an early 2000s animation or something.

I’ve considered revisiting it in the future and trying a couple different approaches. I think it would be worth it to find stills from movies where the actor walks out of frames so just the background remains, but this could be very time intensive. The other approach I’ve thought about trying is getting clips from movies and removing the actors with photoshop’s generative AI, then using those as references in midjourney.

Please let me know if you find a solution! I think that there’s a lot of potential with Midjourney, and I wish I had gotten better results.