However, some Hollywood filmmakers left the strikes worried about how AI may scuttle their industries, but others wanted to know more. This year, many of those artists gathered in a movie theatre in Culver City, California, for the annual Culver Cup, a generative-AI video contest sponsored by FBRC. AI and Amazon Web Services.
Thousands of moviemakers applied to be in the contest, and 50 were chosen. They were given causes and a generation statement from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and Hard Candy producer David Slade, as well as funds for use on AI software like Luma Dream Machine and Playbook, as well as a 3D meal from World Things as a building. They had a minor under three months to move in a two- to five-minute small. From those, eight were chosen to engage, in-person, with the crowd at Monday’s LA Tech Week function selecting the best success.
The opposition was meant to be” a small test”, says FBRC. Todd Terrazas, director of AI, a tool to compare the current state of the still-nascent field to what it has been and where it is going. Some errors in the shorts, such as inconsistent characters or discernible physical artifacts, were expected, but overall, event attendees seemed impressed. Jon Jones, the mind of AWS Startups, says the place was to see “what’s probable, no what’s perfect”.
When it comes to AI in Hollywood, figuring out what’s feasible is a challenging task. The division of Amazon that produces Prime Video’s content spent a lot of last year bargaining with writers ‘ and actors ‘ unions as part of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers over best practices for using AI in movie and television production, despite AWS Startups ‘ efforts to collaborate with companies producing generative AI tools for filmmaking. The AMPTP has been negotiating with creators over AI, among other things, since August.
The Culver Cup was not a product of Amazon MGM Studios ‘ control. Instead, the event attempted to demonstrate how AI could be used to automate processes independent filmmakers could n’t do on their own. Hollywood will have to determine the most appropriate method to use them.
A related prevent came out of Adobe’s Max meeting this week, where the firm showed off fresh AI-powered video-editing resources while claiming they’re” not a substitute for individual creativity”. Meta sang a comparable tune on Thursday, when the company announced a partnership with Blumhouse for which the dread studio paired filmmakers—Casey Affleck, Searching’s Aneesh Chaganty—with Meta researchers to test out its upcoming Movie Gen video device.
As a former chairman, Slade says he saw his part in the Culver Cup likewise. He wants to be a sober voice in the conversation about the technology’s role in filmmaking, even as he’s quick to admit that” there are things that terrify ]him ] about AI”. If anyone can create a general AI movie, he contends, then that’s where you’ll find the following James Cameron or David Lynch.
” I could n’t make a full-length, Pixar-like feature film on my own, just due to the amount of time to do every single second of animation”, says Playbook CTO Skylar Thomas,” but with gen AI, the volume that the individual contributor can create is that much higher, and that’s super exciting”. ( It’s also cheaper, with Playbook cofounder JD LeRoy noting that a single second of VFX in a movie can cost anywhere from$ 2, 000 to$ 20, 000, depending on complexity. )
Gen AI even means artists can do more with less—or without exposure to the administrators, costs, and guardians that have typically dictated what gets made in Hollywood. Slade says the key to making movies is that renting a camera out of the box costs a million dollars. ” That’s just the way it is. You are immediately engaged in a very high-stress situation where a lot of people are requesting a lot of you and you are requesting a lot of permission to do everything you do.
Granted, gen AI’s next auteur, animated or otherwise, probably wo n’t just be some Joe off the street with an idea and no technical know-how. The majority of the Culver Cup finalists have a background or education in filmmaking, which has obviously given them a leg up in terms of the technical steps and lingo used in production. The contest’s winner, who goes by the name Meta Puppet, says he’s been a full-time video editor for 18 years, as well as an actor and a screenwriter.
” You have to learn the fundamentals”, he says. ” Technology will change, but storytelling wo n’t”.
To make his short,” Mnemonade”, really sing, Meta Puppet says he focused on giving the story some emotional heft. ” I do n’t think AI films will go fully mainstream until we get emotional dialog”, he says. He played all the roles in his short, about the poignance of sense memory and an elderly woman’s loss of memory, using AI from Silicon Valley “unicorn” ElevenLabs to shift his vocal performance into each character’s range and voice.
Maddie Hong, who went head-to-head with Meta Puppet in the Culver Cup finals, says that she understands Hollywood’s trepidation when it comes to AI. ” There’s more potential for legal backlash and financial loss”, she says, referring to the danger of unintended ( or even flagrant ) copyright infringement during generation. The studios also have a “higher standard for image continuity”, Hong says, “given that they’re thinking about distribution on all types of platforms and screens”.
Hong agrees with Luma cofounder Amit Jain, who claims that gen AI filmmaking could give the traditional studio system some flexibility in terms of budget and product diversity.
According to Jain,” the majority of the high-budget productions are just recycling old franchises because it’s too difficult to bet on a new idea or a new franchise.” It’s just safer, he says, to reproduce something than it is to imagine something new.
In Jain’s (admittedly biased ) view, making more projects, even with lower budgets, means more people will work and more money will come rolling in. He goes on to say that” I would actually posit” that people will actually have far better careers that are more fulfilling and lasting when they can produce things that people actually do want to watch. He suggests that the people who are going to leave will be the ones who are most resistant to AI if there is going to be any job loss in Hollywood as a result of AI.
That idea is refuted by recent research. A survey of 300 entertainment industry leaders conducted earlier this year found that 75 percent believed gen AI had led to the elimination, reduction, or consolidation of jobs within their departments. It had also resulted in the creation of some jobs, but it was unclear whether new ones would fill the lost positions.
Other studies have examined how more AI in production might affect the VFX industry in particular, with artists frequently reporting interest or excitement about tools that could speed up their sometimes laborious workflows but concern about the ethical and financial ramifications of the technology. It’s cool, as Jain suggests, to collaborate with 11 of your friends to “make a feature film about a Boston Terrier that has superpowers” for relatively little money, but it’s still to be seen how the impact of widespread AI availability will affect the sector as a whole.
For Meta Puppet, it comes down to skill, and who has it. ” I liken gen AI to the piano”, he says. ” Everybody knows about the piano. Not everybody is Mozart. Writing real masterpieces with AI, you have to wear a lot of hats, which is a good and a bad thing because if you have experience, that’s great. Whatever you make is probably going to be bad if you do n’t.
